Grab your popcorn. Here’s chapter two in MCG’s three-part presentation of Ford’s classic 1953 film history, The American Road. 

You can watch part one of the film here. 

A quick recap: The American Road was commissioned in 1953 by Ford Motor Company to celebrate the automaker’s 50th anniversary, but it’s more than a company history. It’s an engaging history of transportation in America, using archival footage from Ford’s own private film company department skillfully spliced together with modern reenactments by a Hollywood movie crew.

Many of you sharp-eyed MCG readers surely spotted that the scenes in part one depictinh Henry Ford’s’s quadricycle were filmed at Greenfield Village—specifically, in Ford’s recreated 58 Bagley Avenue shop. (See these Mac’s Motor City Garage features: “The second car in the city of Detroit” and 58 Bagley Avenue revisted.”)

Alex North, who produced the score for The American Road, became one of Hollywood’s greatest composers. He created the memorable music for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cleopatra, and Under the Volcano, to name a few, and wrote “Unchained Melody,” the Righteous Brothers’ signature song. As we find here, North’s tunesmithing really moves the story along.