(Photo: Car featured in the 2013 film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Credit: Warner Bros.).
If you, like me, noticed your attention diverted from the story by seeing the massive, shiny yellow car in the latest film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 American novel,
The Great Gatsby, you might like to hear (or be reminded of) how Nick Carraway described the vehicle in the novel.
In Chapter 4, Gatsby comes to pick up Carraway to go to lunch:
He saw me looking with admiration at his car. "It's pretty, isn't it, old sport!" He jumped off to give me a better view. "Haven't you seen it before?" I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.What do you think? Does Baz Luhrmann's movie incarnation match Fitzgerald's description?
According to the
Los Angeles Times, the car above is a 1929 Dusenberg Model J. Since the novel was first published in 1925, the car post-dates the time that Gatsby presumably would have been in the market for a jazzy car. However, it certainly fits his character and the times.
More "historically accurate" vehicles, along with other, later 1920s-era luxury cars, are
pictured in a slideshow here. These include the 1920 Kissel Model 6-45 Gold Bug Speedster; a 1921 Mercers Series 5 Raceabout; and a 1923 Lincoln L-Series Sports Phaeton.
If you stay to read the credits of movies like I do, you may have noticed that "Jay Leno's Garage" received a credit in the film. Why was that? What did Jay do? Was the car his? According to
The Hollywood Reporter, Leno, who is an avid car collector, "allowed director Baz Luhrmann's crew to record period-correct sounds of his Dusenbergs."
Later in the novel, of course, Gatsby's vehicle is called "the death car," for reasons you'll know if you've read the book or seen the movie.
[Muse: Would you like to own a car like the Dusenberg above? If so, where would you drive it, or would you just take it to a show and park it to be admired?]
