10k: For The Birds: 1962 Buick Invicta 4-Door Hardtop

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic horror movie The Birds was released three years after his infamous and ground breaking film Psycho.  The Birds did away with the abject terror of the depraved slasher and instead used a combination of sodium vapor spit screen (instead of the standard blue screen which would have cause visible anomalies during high speed wing flapping) and a scoreless soundtrack.  The typical symphonic background music that theater goers had been accustomed to was replaced with bird-like squawks created by something called an electroacoustic trautonium.  Today watching Psycho is a campy but creepy event, but watching The Birds is downright frightening to the ornithophobist in anyone.  This next car, a 1962 Buick Invicta sedan found in Napa County, CA offered for $10,000 via craigslist, was used as a background car in The Birds and was allegedly used to transport Mr. Hitchcock at least once.

The lovely young lady in the image above is Tippi Hedren who is now 84 and runs a wild animal sanctuary east of Los Angeles. Her daughter is Melanie Griffith who inherited her good looks, but is 56 and married to Antonio Banderas…but her grand-daughter is Dakota Johnson (24 and single according to wikipedia) who is the daughter of Melanie and famed Miami Vice star Don Johnson.  What does this have to do with a 1962 Buick Invicta?..absolutely nothing.

This Invicta is a full-sized hardtop sedan powered by a 401 cubic inch Nailhead V8 rated at 325 horsepower and 430 ft-lbs of torque.  Unfortunately it also looks a bit like a tattooed 56 year old twice divorced actress who has been in/out of rehab and is sagging in the wrong places.  At least there is no seagull guano to clean up on this Buick, but asking an additional $8k (figure a typical basket case Invicta sedan like this would be worth $2k max) for the single frame screen walk on…seems like a stretch. 

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