This beautiful American is not a woman but a car ; in France, the sixties were the decade of the car ,many buy their first one in this era .Most of them were small vehicles , and when the hero,a modest factory worker buys a cadillac for a song ,(450 nouveaux francs -a simple deux-chevaux would cost ten times this in 1960)he passes for an important man ,and will even help a politician get a promotion, thanks to his knowledge in Australian geography (thanks to sonny's book )

In the sixties ,some commercials claim "you're judged on your car" and as soon as the VIP see the cadillac , they are at the beck and call of the happy owner .

The gags are numerous ,including one when the hero is locked up in his trunk ,with the key in his pocket ; the cast is a who's who of the French comic actors, featuring Louis De Funès playing twins ,and thus doubling the fun .

But ,besides the absolutely crazy screenplay ,this is an interesting time capsule : the early sixties see the coming of the nouveaux francs which caused problems for those who were not good at arithmetic ; most of the people would still watch TV in the cafes,but along the decade , TV sales rocketed .And everybody took their driving test!

You could expect the worst of a scandal American beauty in Paris, but the title is enticingly misleading - this film is not about sex at all, but only about motor cars, motor bicycles, failing coffee machines, squalid factory circumstances like in Chaplin's "Modern Times" and other humdrum trivialities like that. On this stage of grey working day ordinariness an American beauty enters, but she is a car. I think it's even a Thunderbird. She is white, and when these simple people get the custody of her you must start to worry about anyone getting into any trouble. They all do indeed, many end up in jail, the car itself gets into all kinds of complicated circumstance without anyone driving it, even being shipped on the Seine on a barge, but by some miracle everyone gets out of It alive, and even the car. There is an accident, but it actually leads to the final settlement and establishment of the car as a popular and successful icon and triumph at the same time at last giving full credit to the horse as a superior being. The actors are all delightfully excellent, and Louis de Funès even plays two parts, kickstarting his career. The wonder of the film is that the hilarity never tires, it starts from the very beginning and is sustained throughout, all the characters returning now and then in surprising coincidences, and there is even an amiable political satire. In brief, it's a glorious comedy which, as one reviewer observed, only gets better with time.

Okay, I'm doing this from memory: i haven't seen this movie for 40 years, and it's not findable. But I remember it as seamlessly entertaining, with a simple plot device from which, in true comedic good form, the story flows effortlessly.

A factory worker buys a cadillac for, like, $50 from a divorcée compelled in the settlement to sell it and give the proceeds to her hated husband. When he parks the car next to his boss's pathetic compact, the trouble starts.

SPOILER ALERT you'll never find this jewel anyway, so I'm telling it.

The funniest part of the movie, as I recall, is the running assembly-line joke. The factory is a small, one-room affair, with six or so people laboring around an old, noisy, falling-apart device of unknown function. After much hard labor massaging the machine just so, it's ready for output. But it always freezes, and one worker's job is to kick it in a certain exact place to get it going again. Everyone's moves are totally routinized, hilariously: when the pretty girl rolls up the cart to catch the final product (a one-foot rod of completely unspecific purpose) just as it comes out with a "puoit", the same worker pats her butt at the same identical moment in the process, in the same identical way.

In the last scene, the company president invites the shareholders in to see the automated, completely workerless new plant, he flips a switch and the huge, featureless cube taking up 90% of the room begins to quietly hum. Just when it's clearly about to produce the product, it freezes, and the president has to give it a kick to get it to puoit the product out.