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If someone mentioned this moody flick on the Packard movies/TV thread, i didn't see it, so pardon this post.

Many of you may recall the opening scene of a white or light-colored 1938-39 120 Darrin fishtailing at speed down a stormy road only to fly off a washed out bridge. In that pre-CGI day, have often wondered how they managed to get that very late-model car airborne and presumably catch it,
perhaps in some industrial-strength Ringling Brothers netting. You tell me.

Also, later in that movie, at the title character's funeral in the Connecticut town on a dark, overcast afternoon, the entire village square by the church is surrounded by big formal Classics, nearly all them look, from memory, like 1938-39 Packard Twelves, tho' there may be a few last-generation Cadillac 16s, Pierce Arrows, Lincoln Ks.

Would love to see some stills of all the above, or even a link to an online vid, etc.

One of our friends on the CCCA's Forum found this for me.
Meanwhile, would love to see the funeral scene for the title character, as mentioned in the above post, that looks like a used car lot of late-model Packard Twelves, either a video or stills.

As with the 1976 Prestone antifreeze Jack Palance with his 1946-47 senior Clipper sedan, i had to go slumming on the CCCA's site to find it. C'mon, Packard men (& ladies?), snap to it:

Trailer #1 Scene from Keeper of the Flame Movie (1942) | MOVIECLIPS

If this doesn't paste, just visit the General Forum of www.classiccarclub.org and click on the thread "Keeper of the Flame" to see trailer for the 1942 movie that includes the opening Darrin scene.

You bring up a good question on the catching. I often wondered how many of the cars wrecked in those old movies actually were. Some obviously and even then, an old car was an old car. New cars were new so presumably easily available -- but even by Hollywood's standards, some movies would really have needed a big budget to just pay for the wrecked cars if they all actually were.

Yeah, can't count the times we've seen a big old touring or expensive car fly off a cliff, but the car rolling over and bouncing off the rocks on the way down is a '50 Chevy.

But somehow, doubt they'd crack up a '38 or '39 Darrin for the opening scene of a 1942 movie. And i'd love to see a video and/or close-up stills of that funeral scene mentioned above.