promote the car, often with the now-battered Maxwell on display. The Maxwell Company had assisted in the film's production by supplying a car and by deploying a mechanic to the filming location. The mechanic's job included repeatedly replacing the car's transmission, which kept getting torn up by the harsh desert landscape. A decrepit old Maxwell was famous as the car Jack Benny drove decades after it had stopped being manufactured. The running joke was that Benny was too stingy to buy himself a new car—or even a newer used car—as long as his old one still ran, however poorly. The sounds used for it were pre-recorded, but when a technical fault prevented one of the records from playing, voice actor Mel Blanc himself improvised the sounds of the sputtering car starting up. His performance was received well enough for him to continue that task permanently. The gag of the Maxwell as Benny car was used in the classic cartoon The Mouse That Jack Built. In one Jack Benny Show gag Rochester tells Benny that he reported to the Police that the Maxwell had been stolen although not for three hours; when Jack asks why Rochester delayed so long, Rochester explains it was because he stopped laughing. Many people erroneously assume that the antique automobile Jack Benny is seen driving during his cameo appearance in the 1962 comedy film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a Maxwell; that car is, in fact, a 1931 Cadillac convertible coupe. In the Twilight Zone episode "MR BEVIS" (Season 1 Episode 33) Bevis (Orson Bean) is talking to a police officer (William Schallert) about him buying his wrecked 1924 Rickenbacker. The officer responds facetiously that he has his eye on a 1927 Maxwell, which is two years after the Maxwell company closed. See also Carl Breer List of defunct United States automobile manufacturers References Bibliography Clymer, Floyd. Treasury of Early American Automobiles, 1877–1925. New York: Bonanza Books, 1950. Darke, Paul. "Chrysler: The Baby of the Big Three", in Northey, Tom, ed. World of Automobiles, Vol. 4, pp. 364–9. London: Orbis, 1974. Kimes, Beverly Rae, and Clark, Henry Austin, Jr. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1805–1942 (second edition). Krause Publications, Inc. 1989. . Kimes, Beverly Rae, and Clark, Henry Austin, Jr. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1805–1942 (third edition). Krause Publications, Inc. 1996. . Yanik, Anthony J. Maxwell Motor and the Making of the