BEFORE: Yes, I'm continuing the aviation theme - I could have watched this after "Amelia", but I didn't, so it comes here after another film named after a plane. There's some extra significance this week, just as the war films tied in (in my mind, anyway) with the upcoming trench warfare of Comic-Con, in four days I'll be flying across the country to land at San Diego airport, which is also called Lindbergh Field. Lindbergh's plane (or a replica, anyway) is on display at the airport terminal, I usually see it when I'm picking up my suitcase.
Tough to find a good link tonight - but John Lithgow from "Memphis Belle" was also in "A Civil Action" with Harry Dean Stanton, who was also in "How the West Was Won" with Jimmy Stewart (last seen in "The Shop Around the Corner").
THE PLOT: Charles Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his New York to Paris flight the first solo transatlantic crossing.
AFTER: Ah, now I get the San Diego connection. The plane was built by Ryan Airlines, located in San Diego (I call it "the city that means well"). So I've learned that, along with the fact that the plane on display in San Diego is indeed a replica, the real one is in the Smithsonian (as seen in "Night at the Museum 2").
I couldn't work this film into my upcoming "virtual world tour" - turns out not much of the film takes place in St. Louis, or San Diego for that matter. I could have used it to metaphorically cross the Atlantic, but that would have meant breaking up two similarly-themed films, one set in New York and the other set in London.
This movie has a strange structure - it's very non-linear for a film made in 1957. The movie opens in Lindbergh's hotel room, the night before his famous flight. From there it doesn't go forward, but backward to tell the story of how he got the notion to cross the Atlantic, and how he got the plane designed and built.
Once the flight begins, the timeline fractures again - probably because a long stretch of time with just a man in a cockpit is pretty boring, so they dropped in more flashbacks about Lindy's career in air shows and flying mail planes. I wonder if they filmed his whole history, intending to edit it together chronologically, then needed to break up the monotony of the flight to Paris. It's possible that today's non-linear mind-game films can trace their heritage back to this movie - but I'll bet the practice here was necessary, to keep the audience from nodding off. Today's filmmakers tend to do it just to be "arty".
Lindbergh spent many hours in a confined space, with no human contact, fighting fatigue. Which sounds a lot like my movie project, when I think about it. I watch most of my films in a small basement room, with only a glass of Mountain Dew to get me through the most boring movies. Lindy had a fly to talk to, and I have our cat, Data. Lindbergh went on a long journey with no marked route, making minor course corrections. Ditto - so perhaps Lindbergh is my new hero.
The guy was apparently anti-war, and anti-Semitic, and anti-Communist, for that matter. But also said some unpopular things about eugenics, and also had at least one secret family in Europe, so maybe I'll hold off on the hero worship.
As a film, I'm not sure the story holds up - after all, we all know that his flight turns out to be successful (and the opening title card blows it, in case you didn't pay attention in school), so there's really no dramatic tension at all. Oh, they tried to make it seem like he was off-course or in danger of crashing due to fatigue, but the surprise factor was close to nil.
RATING: 5 out of 10 runways
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