The Yellow Rolls-Royce

By Gunnar Heinrich

IF you succeed in wading through the syrupy period context, bypass the unimaginative title, and forgive the production’s artistic license in casting Ingrid Bergman as a rich, bullheaded American widow named Gerda, then somehow you’re able to sit through watching The Yellow Rolls-Royce.

And the reason you will is not for cinematography. We’re talking early 60s, so like the 70s the picture tends to wash with a brownish-grey cast.

Nor will it be for the magnificent cast’s performance – everyone from Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau to George C. Scott and Shirley MacLaine seems to bring their b-game. It’s not their fault but rather the movie’s boilerplate romance-story framework.

Where this film speaks to car people, particularly collectors, is in how it portrays a very simple but true notion: classic cars are time capsules to our own histories.

From mere moments such as a wedding to entire lifetimes, a car of robust and lasting build quality like an old Royce has an inherent transcendent quality that registers like a personal journal.

Physically, a classic car that’s not been fully restored to concours- grade falsity wears its history like the patina of an old wooden bowl or the weathered facade of a marble edifice.

The Phantom II in The Yellow Rolls-Royce is in its greater context a beautiful and (like us) imperfect representation of an earlier ideal in personalized travel.

But it’s in the micro context, how these individuals lived and how the car filled drastically different roles in each life that proves fascinating and affirming- a carriage to Ascot, military transport for “freedom fighters”, and a widow’s limo – it’s the human condition transported via four wheels, a pushrod straight six, and cow hide.

As car people we can identify.