RHAPSODY IN BLUE
Since Woody Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan, the famous George Gershwin’s symphony is mostly associated to the New York cityscape but, why not transfer it to Paris, in another glamorous movie set? When Frantz Liuzzi began in 1937 to build finely crafted light dinghies and canoes in his workshop of Neuilly, he couldn’t have imagined that two decades later he would be delivering fine and fast runabouts to movie stars like Erroll Flynn. After his canoes had won many trophies on challenging river rapids in France, including during World War Two, when muscle power was more at hand than petrol for nautical sporting activities, in the late 1940s Frantz Liuzzi started a small production of inboard runabouts mostly powered by Italian BPM marine engines made in Milan.
His first successful model, the France-Craft, made a clear reference to the world-famous Chris-Craft
