Word: tuckered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Preston Tucker proclaimed it "The car of tomorrow -- today!" The Tucker seated six adults and could cruise at 100 m.p.h. with its air-cooled rear engine. It boasted innovations that later became Detroit standards: disk brakes, a padded dashboard and curiosities such as a pop-out windshield and a crash compartment. (Preston's idea for seat belts was nixed by his company's board.) Sticker price...
...Only 51 Tuckers were produced. Five have been destroyed; the other 46 are still roadworthy and sell for up to $100,000. Francis Coppola has two; so has George Lucas. Owners admit the car's design flaws (the suspension system, a sticky transmission) but wouldn't trade it for a Lamborghini. Says Owner Curtis Foester: "It's my idea of what a car ought to be." That's the Tucker -- a car for yesterday, today and tomorrow...
Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
Could anyone else play this role with the unforced authority that Bridges, 38, brings to it? Maybe, a decade ago, Jack Nicholson; he was Coppola's choice in 1977, when Tucker was on its first drawing board. But Nicholson, or virtually any other actor, would excavate demons of compulsion and desire. The Bridges version is splendidly driven, maniacally uncomplicated. The performance is also true to the prototype. The actor spent hours studying Tucker home movies; on the set, he wore the man's black pearl cuff links. "He's got it all," says Tucker's son John...
...producer, have been together since 1975. They live with their three daughters in Santa Monica and on a ranch in Montana. "What's so terrific about our marriage is Susan's support of my work," Bridges says. "Her name should be up in the credits along with mine." After Tucker, Susan may be demanding an even bigger screen credit. The movies' most reliable leading man is about to become a white-hot Hollywood star...