Substitute Destruction

I caught the end of Hot Stuff (1979) - a comedy crime movie starring and directed by Dom DeLuise - this afternoon, including the sequence where Jerry Reed's car gets blown up.  Except that it obviously doesn't.  The car in question is, before the explosion, clearly a brand new blue 1979 Pontiac Firebird Formula, (which was basically a Firebird Trans Am mechanically, but with a standard body shell, without all the spoilers and flashy paint job, the main identifier for the Formula being the unique hood with twin air scoops), but when it actually blows up, it has turned into a blue, early seventies, Chevrolet Camaro.  The substitution is most obvious when we get a shot of the front of the burning wreck: whereas the 1979 Firebird has a distinctive twin headlight 'shovel nose' design, the wreck has the characteristic flat front and single headlamps of the pre-1974 second generation Camaro.  The swap was doubtless due to the fact that the Pontiac was only leased for the film and there is no way the production was going to pay out for a new vehicle just to destroy it.  The use of a Camaro as a substitute was perfectly logical - it shared a basic body shell with the Firebird, (the General Motors F-Body) and was produced in greater numbers than the Firebird, making it easier to locate a cheap scrapper suitable for being blown up.  Nevertheless, for those of us familiar with seventies US cars, (I used to own a 1978 Camaro Z-28), it feels slightly jarring as there's no mistaking the substitution.

Seeing it set me to thinking about how many other times I've seen similar substitutions.  Sometimes, there's no obvious reason, as no stunts or destruction is involved.  For instance, I recently caught a showing of the 1971 kids' film Flight of the Doves and, toward the end, when a jarring (to me at least), automotive substitution too k place: an unmarked Garda police car is seen driving down a track, then we cut to seeing it pull up outside a cottage.  As it drives down the track, it is clearly a basic model Ford Zephyr Mk IV, but when it pulls up, it is clearly a higher spec model of Zephyr, with front spotlights fitted.  It is even a slightly different colour, (the driving car appears to be a very dark grey, the parked car black).  Why the change?  Most likely, the driving down the lane sequence was filmed as a pick up shot, after main location shooting had finished and the original Zephyr simply wasn't available so a substitute was used, (you can't see the occupants when it is coming down the lane, unlike the later shot, where they are seen exiting the car, reinforcing this suspicion).  War films also feature many examples of vehicles being substituted for scenes of their destruction.  I remember watching a Yugoslavian war movie which featured some of those impressive looking German 'Tiger tanks' which were mocked up from T-34s, (they most famously featured in Kelly's Heroes (1970)).  You could tell when one of them was about to be destroyed as it would, a split second before exploding, transform into a tatty grey-painted Sherman tank.  Obviously, the 'Tiger' conversions were too valuable to be damaged, (they appeared in multiple Yugoslav war movies), whereas Shermans were available in greater numbers.  Interestingly, in A Bridge Too Far (1977), it was the Sherman tanks that employed stunt doubles - if you look carefully at the burning carcasses of knocked out 'Shermans', you can see that they actually appear to be M-24s, despite having been a Sherman when attacked.

So, does any of this matter, except to a pedant like me?  Well, possibly.  Arguably, where such substitutions are noticable, it undermines the viewer's 'suspension of disbelief' and makes the artifice of film making too obvious.  Of course nowadays, with CGI, such substitutions aren't usually necessary, (although cheap CGI processes often look even less convincing than a substitution).  Even back in the day, bigger budgeted productions would use replicas for destruction scenes, some times full size, (a number of full size M-48 tank replicas are destroyed in battle sequences in Patton (1970), for instance), or some times large scale models, (although the use of too small scale miniatures can look ridiculous).  Anyway, whichever way you look at it, the fact is that spotting these things is actually one of the many pleasures I get from watching movies, rather than detracting from my viewing pleasure.