Glamour mode

This Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III Park Ward Drophead Coupé was as much a star of the louche, Swinging Sixties film Blow-Up as its lead actor

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As the model for its maker's 'celebrity customers', this dark-blue HJ Mulliner, Park Ward Silver Cloud III was well chosen as the headlining vehicle in Blow-Up. Here, olde-worlde engineering met the slick glamour of new-world styling in a coachbuilt model that appealed to the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Peter Sellers as perhaps the world's ultimate luxury convertible. It was certainly the most expensive – in the Rolls-Royce line-up, only the James Young Phantom V limousine cost more. Each built-to-order example took six months to create, using lightweight steel and aluminium.

The car appears throughout Blow-Up. Filmed between August and October 1966, and directed by 54-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni, this immersive reflection by the maestro Italian auteur on the nature of modern celebrity, and the tension between art and commercialism, is probably the most accurate depiction on celluloid that we have of the fleeting charms of a 'swinging' London of almost six decades ago, but it is also the most damning.

It was never likely to be a celebration. Antonioni's back catalogue of the early 1960s - La Notte, L'Eclisse and Red Desert – had been masterly reflections on the rise of the economic miracle in post-war Italy and its negative effects on human relationships. Famed for never repeating a shot in his superficially simple yet emotionally complex productions, Antonioni explored absence and the search for answers in stories, generally without conventional resolution. The journey was the point of it all, not the final destination. His was an exquisitely framed world of elegant, wealthy, but mostly unhappy people - dreamily beautiful Italian women, such as Monica Vitti, in particular - looking for meaning in an increasingly meaningless modern landscape.

Great cars often featured - you can see a Lancia Flaminia Zagato in La Notte, an Alfa Romeo 2000 Touring Spider in