“Those Huge Fins”

9 July 2015 Redazione Roberto Marrone

Maybe because as a child I lived these as dream cars that were very difficult to see in person. You learned about them thanks to the movies. I’m talking about American cars from the 50’s and 60’s, the huge sedans and coupes that I consider stylistic masterpieces and traveling sculptures. Of course so different from the little European cans of the same period and perhaps because of it even more admired and of a legendary status. Huge as also their usual roads, there in the States, traveling silent and majestic. Finishing touches were sometimes excessive, as in the late ‘50s enormous fins had grown, adorned with large amounts of chrome trim, while the headlights, especially at the rear, could take the more imaginative and bizarre shapes. This style is widely regarded as exaggerated, but I see this kind of design as what freedom really is. Sometimes, the best feature is just everything that might as well not be there, because not necessary, those added frames, those huge chrome bumpers, which today could build three entire cars, those roof pillars, shapes never dull, that excess that went hand in hand with their size. Of course because of the size, they needed even larger engines, so the displacement of the V8s dramatically increased, but gasoline was cheap.
And how can we forget those convertible so ahead of times, with those huge metal roofs disappearing in the trunk? Power windows and air conditioning, still fiction for Europeans at that time. But what I’m getting at? Simply I have often wondered, why the majority of these cars have a modest value on the market, or even a little interest among collectors. Do not tell me about consumption, because there are European cars that even with smaller engines, “drink” similar amounts of gasoline and can’t boast engines as reliable. Only for the time they represented, I always thought in their revaluation, but I have never seen that, except in very rare cases. So I’m questioning if time will make justice to those huge fins…

Roberto Marrone