The Lincoln has always had a chequered history; it’s been up and down in popularity and in and out of fashion as regularly as, well, any other element of utterly iconic Americana you can think of – checked flannel shirts, maybe, or the music and suits of the original Rat Pack era.
It wasn’t a promising start. The original company went bust five years after it was founded, and it’s been a subsidiary of Ford since 1922. But it was that acquisition which led to its reinvention as a luxury brand.
There was another hiccup in the mid-Seventies, when Lincolns, which had by that time begun to model their dimensions on those of aircraft carriers, were the cars least suitable to cope with the fuel crisis of 1973-74, and went sharply out of favour with consumers.
But at their best, they could be remarkably cool cars. The touring vehicles of the 1940s and the Zephyr have their admirers, but most feel the high point was the range of Continentals which launched in 1961 and evolved through that decade.
There was hardly an episode of Mission Impossible, Hawaii-5-O or Ironside in which you couldn’t spot one somewhere. In Goldfinger, Oddjob drives a 1964 four-door sedan (sadly crushed). The 1965 model popped up in Thunderball, though, and was still cool enough to feature (with its suicide rear doors) as the heroes’ car in The Matrix nearly four decades later. A modified 1961 Lincoln is the car that JFK was assassinated in on his fateful visit to Dallas.
The current presidential ride is a Cadillac, but there are signs that the Lincoln may be becoming cool again. The marque received a boost with the 2011 film of Michael Connelly’s novel The Lincoln Lawyer (published in 2005), the first of a series of books featuring Micky Haller, who works out of the back of his car rather than an office.
The success of the movie was in no small measure due to its star, Matthew McConaughey, who had himself become rather uncool after a decade in which most of his films were lacklustre romantic comedies. The Lincoln Lawyer helped to revive and broaden his career as an actor, and was followed by a series of roles so successful that some critics have called it “the McConaissance”.
So it probably seemed obvious to sign McConaughey up as the public face of Lincoln’s MK range, and inevitable that the company would aim to produce something fairly cool. But even fans of the actor’s sub-zero performance in True Detective will probably not be disappointed by the end results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGhLcVqxf0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4lklnkk8SU
