Released in December 2023 and again on January 15 next year, Midnight in Paris is also available on demand video on Arte. Through this film, Woody Allen offers a dreamlike journey within the lost generation of American writers of the 1920s and 1930s.
A screenwriter who came to Paris with his fiancée, Gil Spender, lives an extraordinary experience every night: at midnight, a limousine silently travels the cobbled streets of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and stops at Owen Wilson, alias Gil Spender. He climbs into the Peugeopt 184, which takes him back to another time, at the heart of the tumultuous years animated by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, but also Gertrude Stein and Picasso.
As it turns out, the limousine in question is a car that is part of the L’Aventure Peugeot collection. As such, it is part of the permanent exhibition at the museum located in Sochaux.
Its body, designed by Jean-Henri Labourdette and dated 1928, dresses an unknown episode in Peugeot’s history. During the Roaring Twenties, Peugeot had the ambition to join the elite of French brands offering prestigious models.
Alongside Hispano-Suiza, which reigned supreme in the luxury market, more mainstream companies also sought to play a role in this niche. Thus, Renault offered the 40 CV while Panhard & Levassor had a 35 HP and Peugeot the Type 184.
A Peugeot 174 S sportingly dressed by Labourdette.
The main innovation of the Peugeot 184, as with the preceding 174, is hidden under its hood, in the form of a valveless engine, a 3.8-liter six-cylinder. In this type of engine, the conventional distribution (composed of valves controlled by camshafts) is replaced by mobile sleeves pierced with “lights”; these sleeves alternately sliding into the cylinders opening or closing the intake or exhaust ports.
This technology has qualities in terms of silence, flexibility, and driving pleasure, but it suffers from a certain anemia. In any case, the economic crisis of 1929 would put an end to most of the initiatives that proceeded from excessive ambitions. Peugeot would definitively give up trying to enter the luxury universe. Unfortunately, the Lion would never return to this capitulation…
