Nearly 40 Years Later, C'était Un Rendezvous Is Still Fantastic

Welcome to Sunday Matinee, where we highlight classic car reviews or other longer videos I find on YouTube. Kick back and enjoy this blast from the past.

I'm gonna do something a little different than posting old Top Gear clips for this week's edition of Sunday Matinee.

I can't say I was too impressed with the antics of the now-arrested Russian public menace known as "the Black Devil." Not that I condone acts of hoonage on crowded public roads, but his videos were nothing special. He mostly just drives on sidewalks, weaves in and out of traffic, and rides his Hayabusa like a dick. He's an inconsiderate jerk of a driver, not some daredevil.

But his videos got me thinking about C'était un Rendezvous, the famous short film from 1976, where director/driver Claude Lelouch goes on a high-speed joyride through the streets of Paris around sunrise. Mind you, this was done way before the days of GoPros and YouTube, so what Lelouch did here was kind of revolutionary. He mounted a gyro-stabilized camera onto the bumper of his Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 and then recorded himself speeding off to meet a woman for an early morning rendezvous.

As we wrote in 2006, Lelouch dubbed over the sound of the Benz's V8 with that of a V12 from a Ferrari 275GTB. It may not be the most authentic edit in the world, but there's no denying that it sounds amazing. And the driving itself is very real.

Often imitated, never duplicated, here is C'était un Rendezvous, complete with a documentary about it at the end. It's in French, so if any of our Francophile readers care to give us a highlight reel version, that would be awesome.

via Jalopnik http://jalopnik.com/5983188