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Theory of flight and filmmaking, the main precursor is Lean's The Sound Barrier. "A little bit of wood and steel and canvas," enough for the odyssey from New York to Paris? "Lucky Charlie" Lindbergh, "the Lone Eagle" and "the Flying Fool," James Stewart has him as the Baudelairean albatross, awkward on land but indomitable in the air. The transatlantic voyage is like any other project, it must be financed and shopped from studio to studio. (The outfit that takes the job is so modest that the top executive cooks his lunch on site with an acetylene torch: "Finally we get a chance at a good order, and you make it fry fish!") Between virgin and monoplane, a subtly perverse Billy Wilder romance hidden inside a respectable biopic. A Charles Eames montage handles the nuts and bolts operation, the night before the takeoff finds Lindbergh sleepless in bed above a lobbyful of clattering typewriters. Inspiration from St. Christopher, protector of "wayfarers across bridgeless waters," plus the jolly suspender salesman on the train ("We hold the pants of the Middle West"). Barnstormer, Army cadet, air mail pilot, "gypsy of the sky," memories of a tiny dot lost over the oceanic vastness. Frost on the wings, "dead reckoning" navigation helped by the mirror donated by a cloche-hat Leucothea. (Its glare opens his slumbering eyes during a tailspin, though the hero's closest relationship is with the fly buzzing around the cockpit.) Along the way, some of Wilder's most purely cinematic effects—thick gray fog giving way to the rolling greens of coastal Canada in the window within the CinemaScope frame, the triumphant score suddenly cutting out to the vessel's dying engine. Ford ponders his own aviator grounded and soaring that same year (The Wings of Eagles). With Murray Hamilton, Bartlett Robinson, Patricia Smith, Marc Connelly, Arthur Space, and Charles Watts.
--- Fernando F. Croce |