Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)

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Last week’s review of ‘It Started With a Kiss‘ starring the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car brought to mind another great picture about a car concept, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Tucker: The Man and His Dream‘. That’s right; the famous director of ‘The Godfather‘ and ‘Apocalypse, Now‘ did a motoring movie back in 1989.

Set in the late 1940s, the film stars Jeff Bridges (the Dude from ‘The Big Lebowski‘) as Preston Tucker. He’s an idealist and an engineering genius who made great strides during the American war effort. With WWII over, Tucker knew that Americans would be thirsty for something new. A car that symbolized the bright future ahead of them.

Preston designed the Tucker Torpedo, a “car of the tomorrow” that didn’t just look futuristic, it was technologically sophisticated and had comprehensive safety features that would benefit the American motorist. Features like fuel injection, independent suspension and disc brakes were more than a decade away as far as traditional American automakers were concerned. Tucker’s safety enhancements like seat belts, shatter-proof windshield, integrated roll-bar in the roof and directional ‘cyclops’ third headlight to see around corners would make current American cars look like a horse-and-buggy. But Detroit’s ‘Big-3’ were not willing to incur the expense for those safety features as they would reduce profitability.

The opening scene in ‘Tucker’ shows just how naïve and idealistic Preston is when he boldly tells his family that his Tucker automobile would completely reinvent the way American cars would be made. But his upstart car company was up against the might of GM, Ford, and Chrysler; and they weren’t about to let some ‘nobody’ challenge their control of the American automobile industry.

To fund his dream, Tucker launches an IPO and secured $15 million in funding. He leased the single largest factory in the world (a vacant manufacturing facility for B-52 bombers) and embarked on a nationwide promotional tour of the Tucker Torpedo (before he even built them!) complete with radio spots, jingles and The Tuckerettes dancers. Preston Tucker’s own hubris helped lead to his downfall.

Tucker is the personification of the “can-do” American spirit where anyone who builds a better mousetrap can make it big. But he underestimates the level of greed of capitalist society. Those established brands in the car business fight dirty with Tucker, pressuring their suppliers to refuse to sell him the raw materials needed to build cars, like steel. The Big-3 American automakers, and their powerful political allies, made it nearly impossible for Tucker to compete. And when those underhanded methods didn’t work, a character assassination did the job.

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History remembers Preston Tucker as a fraud, but this movie attempts to set the record straight. Tucker only produced 51 examples of his ‘the ‘car of tomorrow‘ but 47 of them are still in existence today, including two owned by Francis Ford Coppola himself.

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