Pontoon fenders and Emil Diedt

Our friend Geoff Hacker would like to know more about this image of a pontoon-fendered roadster that he found (the image, not the roadster, though I have no doubt of his ability to turn up the car itself someday) in the John Bond collection in Kettering University’s Scharchburg Archives. All he has to go on is that Emil Diedt built it in the early 1930s, and that the lovely lady standing next to it is actress Joan Bennett. Given the time and the actress and the over-the-top styling, was this car featured in a Hollywood film or simply built for a Hollywood celebrity?

And no, this is not the Topper car.

UPDATE: Geoff also found this magazine article in the November 1936 issue of Modern Mechanix that featured the car, but added little detail.

Based on that, then, we can see that Joan Bennett starred in four films in 1936: Wedding Present, Two in a Crowd, Thirteen Hours by Air, and Big Brown Eyes. But I’ve yet to find a mention of such a car being used in any of those four movies – or in any of Bennett’s earlier movies.