MovieChat Forums > Kiss Them for Me (1957) Discussion > 50's cars in 1944?

50's cars in 1944?

posted 17 years ago by jastpeel
4 replies | jump to latest

This movie was made in 1957 but was set in 1944. When Cary Grant and Gwinneth Livingston are on the cable car, you can see vehicles in the background through the window which are early 50's models.

Vehicle production ceased in early 1942 and no vehicles were produced for consumer production until after the war. There are a few 1942 vehicles as the production run was introduced in September of 1941 but the December attack on Pearl Harbor shifted all vehicle production. Thus there are no 1943, 44, or 45 models other than the military staff cars produced by the big three.

[–] zh84 15 years ago

This is covered in the goofs. Jayne Mansfield herself is even more of an anachronism: women did not dress, or even look, that way in 1944!

[–] mark-1589 12 years ago

I also found it odd that they cast Werner Klemperer as an American. He was later to become famous as Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes. He has a blatant accent and doesn't seem American in the least. Couldn't they find any other actor to play that role?

[–] Gatorman9 11 years ago

They weren't paying a lot of attention to those kinds of details in this particular movie. One especially glaring error is the large, modern airport full of large, modern airliners the PBY takes off from at the beginning of the picture. Doesn't look remotely like wartime Oahu, or even 1957 Oahu. It must have been LAX, even in 1957. Even the PBY, though a classic aircraft of the period, is a stretch. I don't think they had the range to make San Francisco from Hawaii, and even if they did, they were so slow it would take about 100 years. Assuming there were such a thing as an overwater interstate highway, you could almost drive there practically as fast in a modern car. The closing sequence is similarly flawed -- the USS BOXER (CV-21), the carrier pictured there, wasn't commissioned until after the war, and the aircraft shown aboard, the Douglas AD-1 Skyraider, didn't enter service until then either.

[–] jonkennedy 10 years ago

As for the PBY Catalina's range, according to Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II, the models most produced during the war, the PBY-5/5A had a range of 2520 miles. The distance from Honolulu to San Francisco is 2393 miles. Now a margin of only 127 miles over such a distance is really cutting it close. Probably too close figuring for headwinds, navigation errors, etc.

The plane was capbable of extrodinarily long flights however, if it wasn't carrying much of a payload and was stripped down. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double_Sunrise

You are correct it was a slow aircraft with a cruising speed of only 125 mph. It could do close to 200 mph in a pinch, but of course that would severely diminish its range. At cruising speed, it would take those guys a little over 19 hours to get back and forth.