Eager to keep up with the latest Motor City trends, in 1951 the grand old Hudson Motor Car Company introduced a pillarless hardtop.

When the striking 1948 Hudson was introduced in December of 1947, it was an innovator in Detroit styling. (See our feature on the Step-Down Hudsons here.) Unfortunately, the leadership would not last for long, as Hudson’s competitors rolled out their own new postwar models soon enough.

Hudson had a special limitation to work with. Though the Monobilt unit body/frame construction was highly advanced for its time, its robust construction didn’t lend itself to annual facelifts. However, there was one area where the Hudson stylists had some freedom to work with the Step-Through platform: above the beltline in the greenhouse region. So in January of 1951, late into the ’51 model year, Hudson introduced its first pillarless hardtop (above), and made the new body style available in the Super, Commodore, and Hornet lines. Following a Motor City trend of the moment in which hardtops got their own glamorous names—Oldsmobile Holiday, Buick Riviera, and so on—Hudson called its pillarless two-door the Hollywood.

While the Hollywood hardtops brought some welcome style and glamor to Hudson showrooms, they never sold in any large numbers. Generally, the production volume ran to a thousand or two units in each trim level per year, a mere shadow of the two two-door and four-door sedan styles. Arguably, the most successful of the Step-Down Hollywoods in the styling  department was the 1954 version, in which the pillarless hardtop nicely complemented the squared-off ’54 Hudson exterior refresh. Also, in ’54 the Hollywood’s three-piece backlite was replaced with a more modern one-piece rear glass.

When the complete Hudson car line was moved over to the Nash platform for 1955 (below) the Hollywood retained a prominent position in the product catalog. (See our feature on the troubled1955-57 Hash here.) For Hudson’s final year in history in 1957, one of the two available body styles was a Hollywood two-door hardtop, offered in two trim levels, Super and Custom. A mere 749 examples were produced.