Can you identify the mystery machine?

Old Cars Weekly editor Angelo Van Bogart recently stumbled upon this old photo featuring a couple of Hollywood types and a mysterious car and knew OCW readers would have some fun with the questions posed by the car.

There are some clues on the photograph, but they are almost as mysterious as the car. The photo is identified as a still from the 1939 Paramount Pictures film “Me and My Gal,” “Unmarried” and “Night Spot Hostess.” A search in the Internet Movie Database has no listing for “Me and My Gal,” but does for “Unmarried,” which had a working title as “Night Spot Hostess,” so we’ll call the film “Unmarried.”

The actors are identified as Buck Jones and Helen Twelvetrees. “Unmarried” was Twelvetrees’ last film after a strong run of roles through the 1930s. Jones gained his fame as a star of westerns until he died in the famous 1942 Cocoanut Grove night club fire in Boston.

“Unmarried” was anything but a western film, and the starring “horse” shown here was anything but the four-legged kind of ride. The open car in the photo appears to sport tear-drop-shaped headlamps from a Ford Motor Co. product, a 1937 Buick-type grille with an inverted and louvered lower center grille section in the style of a 1940 Plymouth and rather late-1930s-style bulbous fenders.

So the questions remain: Who or what company built this movie mystery machine? What was the car based on? Was it a roadster or a phaeton? What happened to it after the film? Does it still exist?

If you can provide more information or additional photos of the car, write to: angelo.vanbogart@fwmedia.com or Old Cars Weekly, 700 E. State St., Iola, WI 54990. We’ll be sure to print the responses in a future issue.

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