Nuclear holocaust, Fred Astaire, and a $7000 Ferrari

Ferrari 750 Monza 0492M at the Bonham & Butterfield auction in Carmel, CA

Making the rounds on cable TV movie networks these past few weeks has been the 1959 film On the Beach. The basic plot is a US submarine and its crew pop up in Melbourne, Australia after WWIII to learn that there are but a few weeks left before the bad stuff drifts down to Oz and wipes out the remainder of the human race. Fun stuff.

The book was written by Australian author Nevil Shute, who according to a 1959 United Artists press release distributed before the opening of the film “still drives his Jaguar in Australian competition.” In other words, a real car guy.

While film buffs may discuss this motion picture in terms of the complicated relationship between male and female leads (Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, respectively) or the handling of the complete annihilation of all human kind, what is really of interest to those of us who love things internally-combusted are the sports cars used in the film.

 

Fred Astaire in Ferrari 750 Monza painted white                  MGM/UA

First, Ava Gardner's character drives a beautiful two-tone Austin-Healey 3000 Mk. I, particularly present at the film's end when dashes up a dirt road to catch a last glimpse of the US sub sailing out of the harbor toward its unknown fate.

Then the Fred Astaire character shows up with a Ferrari 750 Monza that he'd just purchased with the intention to start racing. For whatever reason the car was painted white for the film (more on this car later).

According to the United Artists press release author Shute “wrote a sequence in the book where drivers conduct a race without regard for life, limb, or reason,” that became on film the highpoint for car enthusiasts.

The race sequence was staged not in Australia, where much of the rest of the film was shot, by at Riverside International Raceway, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The track, which opened in 1957, had a wide open appearance that producers thought could present rural Australia. Riverside International Raceway closed in 198X and the site in now covered by suburban sprawl.

 

Staged sports car racing action at Riverside for the film "On the Beach"   MGM/UA

Producer/Director Stanley Kramer hauled an enormous film crew out to Riverside for 12 days of shooting. The team consisted of an 80-member movie crew, a three-man stunt driving team, a helicopter pilot, and 14 of America's “leading sports car drivers” including Dan Gurney, John Timanus, Max Balchowsky, Chuck Porter, and camera car pilot Skip Hudson.

The goal of the team was to film 16 “grinding, flaming smash-ups and dozens of skid spin-outs, collisions, near-misses and other generally terrifying feats at speeds up to 170 mph,” according to the UA press release.

Only the stunt team, headed by Casey Loftin and included Harvey Perry and Dale Van Sickle drove the cars that skidded, spun, collided or otherwise behaved improperly. For the most dramatic stunts, sacrificial cars were towed behind the stunt drivers and released at speed to meet their doom. In total eight racing cars met their end in the making of this film: a Jaguar coupe, an MG, an Austin-Healey, a Corvette, a Nash-Healey, a Jowett Jupiter, an MG Special, and a Porsche. That's enough vintage metal for a Russo and Steele auction right there. Think of what those cars would be worth today. And cars weren't the only victims of the carnage; three cameras were destroyed during filming.

The hero car of the movie, both to the paying public then and to those who love cars today, was the Ferrari 750 Monza Scaglietti Spyder, serial number 0492M driven by Fred Astaire's character to win his first, last and only race (he soon after commits suicide by running the car in a closed garage rather than suffer an agonizing death from radiation poisoning).

The Ferrari 750 Monza was powered by a Aurelio Lampredi-designed 3.0 liter DOHC light-alloy four cylinder engine which produced 250 HP and was sheathed in an all-aluminum body by Italian coachbuilder Scaglietti. The car originally was (and now again is) painted in Ferrari red.

Ferrari 0492M , our movie car, was first sold and displayed in Europe and then returned to the factory. It was then resold to John von Neumann of Hollywood Sports Cars. The car was raced by von Neumann, and later by Harrison Evans, with great success at Torrey Pines (co-driven by Phil Hill), Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, Pomona, San Diego, and Paramount Ranch.

At the end of 1956 the 750 Monza was offered for sale at $7000. The car wasn't sold and was re-advertised in 1957. It was purchased by Stanley Kramer Productions of Hollywood, California who painted the car white and either sold or leased the car to the studio for use in the film.

After the car's starring role in the film, it was returned to the Ferrari importer in New York where it was stored for many years. It passed through a number of different owners throughout the years, including the Rosso Bianco Collection museum in Aschaffenburg, Germany.

This car was sold at the 2006 Bonham & Butterfield auction in Carmel, CA for $1,107,000 to a private collector in Colorado.

That would be $1,100,000 more than what the car was sold for in 1957. Which is about 10% of the $11,000,000 the movie grossed on its release in 1959.

 

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