The Gran Torino, a perfect symbol for the movie

Car guys get it.

You could prowl vintage car shows for years and not find an automobile that, in its malign typicality, better summarizes Detroit's fall than the 1972 Gran Torino. Let's begin with the thing itself: The car was tubby and it was awkward. It handled like a block of ice with a steering wheel. It lacked even minimum corrosion proofing and so rusted with relish in northern climates. That this oaf of a car should be given the sporty-sounding but nonsensical Italian name Gran Torino -- meaning "great Turin" -- is a bleak joke. (This isn't the car's first brush with pop-culture fame: A mid-'70s Gran Torino, with white hockey-stick paint scheme, starred in the TV series "Starsky and Hutch" and the 2004 retread movie.)

The 1972 Gran Torino was one of no less than nine largely redundant iterations of the Torino nameplate, part of a classic Detroit product strategy that attempted to fill every cranny of the segment at the lowest possible investment. That year's Torino -- "Gran" or otherwise -- also represented a significant retreat in terms of engineering. The previous model-year car was built on a unitized steel chassis, or monocoque, like modern cars. For 1972, the Torino returned to a virtually obsolete and inferior body-on-frame design, which lowered the costs of putting multiple body styles on the chassis.

You could blame Ford's penny-chiseling management for the Torino's mediocrity, but you would also have to indict the assembly line. In 1972, Detroit's unionized workforce was in the full flower of its indifference. Shop foremen battled against even the most common-sense efforts at accountability and quality control. Drug use, absenteeism and even sabotage were endemic. Managers were afraid to walk the factory floors alone.