By Genie and Gary Anderson

Parked in the early morning sun in front of the Seamen’s Memorial at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, our Mercedes CLS500 attracted more attention from passersby than any other car we’ve driven recently.

There certainly are some head-turning body styles being crafted today, but “attention-getting” isn’t the first adjective one normally associates with Mercedes-Benz. For all too many years, Mercedes has been known for its conservative - dare we say stodgy? - styling. Solid flanks, slab sides, substantial grille, upright and uptight.

Nevertheless, that buttoned-down theme seemed to suit its owners and certainly contributed to the high resale value of used Mercedes sedans.

The CLS500 changes all that. Not that we shouldn’t have been warned. After years of cutting its “sports cars” (actually comfortable two-seat convertibles best-suited for a spin to the country club for lunch and a round of golf) from the same cloth as its sedans, Mercedes’ recent offerings to the enthusiast market appear to have been influenced more than a little by development partnerships with McLaren and some peeks across the Alps into Milano and Modena.

With the CLS500, first unveiled as a concept car only two years ago, Mercedes has applied those swooping lines and the imposing three-point insignia in the center of the understated grille to a four-door sedan for the first time.

Built on the E-class chassis, though it borrows only a few components from the line, the CLS500 shows its curves from every possible angle. In front, it is every bit as sporting as anything in the Mercedes line and shows Jaguar what a sexy front-end can look like. From the rear, the sleek lines are everything that BMW’s bumbling rear-end styling should be, but isn’t.

The side view is perhaps the most distinctive. A smooth curve sweeps up from the front wheel well to the top of the tail lights and is echoed by the belt line. The roof line is pulled tight from the top of the door pillar to the same point on the tail lights. The overall effect is almost that of a coupe. In fact, though this car has four doors, Mercedes calls it a coupe.

Like a rose, by any name this looks like one sweet car.

However, that styling excellence created the one major misgiving we have about the car. Though it looks like a very hot sports coupe, in its basic form the CLS500 delivers sedan performance. A good sedan, but a sedan nevertheless. So it’s all about unfulfilled expectations.

This is not really in the nature of a complaint. During our week with this new Mercedes model, we made a quick run down to Honda Raceway Laguna Seca with a side trip out to the coast for a picnic on the beach near Monterey. The next day we took a more leisurely drive up to Napa and Sonoma for a morning wine tasting at Acacia and an afternoon at the Vintage Fair on the Sonoma town square.

These two back-to-back trips gave us a good chance to try the car in all sorts of conditions, and on an absolute basis, we weren’t disappointed. The 5-liter engine delivers a class-comparable 302 horsepower, producing 339 pound-feet of torque. The class-leading seven-speed touch-shift automatic transmission is the smoothest we’ve experienced on any car we’ve driven, whether it selected the shift points or we preempted its decisions. With that power and control, we had no trouble dealing with anything the road or traffic could dish out during the entire weekend.

With three selectable modes for the shock absorbers - comfort, stiff or stiffer - and a choice of comfort or sport modes for the air suspension, we also could adapt the ride and handling precisely to the road surface, our passengers’ preferences and our own driving style.

The car was as pleasing on the interior as the exterior. Luxury touches abounded, from the wood veneer that swept across the dash and accented the front and rear center consoles, to convenient adjustment controls on the doors for the front seats, which could be either heated or ventilated to suit the climate.

The instruments were easy to read, in a sort of retro style, complete with a large standard-dial clock on the center cluster. The optional navigation system was intuitive in its operation and controls. Our favorite was the Mercedes cruise control. A simple flick of a lever at the rear of the steering wheel actuated and set the cruise control, with the desired speed boldly indicated on the perimeter of the speedometer.

A small reality check here: To achieve the sleek roofline, the stylists had to sacrifice a few inches of headroom in the back seats. Though legroom is more than adequate, anyone pushing 6 feet tall will find their heads brushing the headliner.

The price was commensurate with the car’s quality. The bottom line on the window sticker of the car we drove is $72,300, including $5,380 of desirable options and, gulp, $1,300 of gas-guzzler tax.

So why were we not 100 percent pleased with this car? It was that expectations problem. This car has the lines of a true sporting automobile, but unfortunately it drives like a very comfortable sedan. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In the CLS500, you get a stylish and elegant car that will make you feel good and impress your friends and neighbors.

But for those of us who want this car to perform as well as it looks, we’re left wanting more. We’d like to see the steering a little tighter, the handling a little tauter than even the stiff settings provided and a little more oomph when the accelerator is pushed to the floor. Fortunately, Mercedes has a solution for this particular brand of insanity. It’s called the CLS55 AMG, a variant that offers the same stylish lines and luxury interior, but with 469 horsepower, a sportier five-speed transmission, high-performance wheels and tires and a more responsive suspension package. The only catch is that it costs a bit over $20,000 more.

Either way, you’re getting perhaps the most stylish car Mercedes has put on the road since the gull wing 300SL in the 1950s. We would never have believed that the grande dame of Stuttgart had it in her.