Anything So Edgar Allan Poeish
Wings (1927)
directed by William A. Wellman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The Sound Barrier (1952)
directed by David Lean
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Wings was my grandfather's favorite movie. He collected aviation books, built detailed models of airplanes, and owned prints commemorating famous dogfights from the first World War. In World War II, my grandfather served in the Navy on a transport ship in the Pacific. He was a passenger aboard a Concorde once, from New York to Paris.
The aerial sequences in Wings were filmed in San Antonio, at Kelly Field. It is meant to pass for the French countryside, and does. No one flies over the Alamo. The scrub brush looks bombed-about as is.
The Sound Barrier, released twenty-five years later, tells of British efforts to build a jet that can break Mach 1, then erroneously contends that the British were the first to successfully do so. But Lean's is the better movie, and the obvious template for every flight-related film from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13. Wings is famous for putting cameras on planes, but the love triangle at the story's center is standard sentimentality.
Still, it's difficult not to see Gary Cooper (as Cadet White) as the consummate aerial daredevil, onscreen for two sexy minutes until he dies in a fiery crash. "Luck or no luck," he says, "when your time comes, you're going to get it." White packs a bar of almond milk chocolate, cultural precursor to Beeman's gum.
The Sound Barrier is about irresponsible men committed to legacies instead of the wives who love them and the children they conceived together: selfishness masking as the greater good. While her test pilot husband takes to the air each afternoon, Susan (Ann Todd) sits in at the local matinee, where she can't hear the engines overhead.
Lean vigorously defends science as the philosophy of progressive men/Modern Man. Engineers talk of "continuous creation." They mean the past, present, and future, encompassed in what a telescope can accomplish, because of how it's made - mirrors and angles - and the people who understood enough to imagine it in the first place. "There were books once that said the earth was flat," a pilot says, just before he volunteers for the mission that will kill him. He sits on the runway in his jet and watches a bird above him, and then the wind as it moves through a field of wheat in the countryside around him.
Tony dies with half an hour to go, and in an incredible follow-up, Leans surveys the wreckage as men with cranes and winches try to excavate the pilot's body from the airplane's crater, deep in the ground: a smear of fuselage and soil, barely anything human at all. Afterwards, Susan lies in bed and stares out her window at the stars. They are worse than any horror movie, unblinking and far away.
directed by William A. Wellman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The Sound Barrier (1952)
directed by David Lean
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Wings was my grandfather's favorite movie. He collected aviation books, built detailed models of airplanes, and owned prints commemorating famous dogfights from the first World War. In World War II, my grandfather served in the Navy on a transport ship in the Pacific. He was a passenger aboard a Concorde once, from New York to Paris.
The aerial sequences in Wings were filmed in San Antonio, at Kelly Field. It is meant to pass for the French countryside, and does. No one flies over the Alamo. The scrub brush looks bombed-about as is.
The Sound Barrier, released twenty-five years later, tells of British efforts to build a jet that can break Mach 1, then erroneously contends that the British were the first to successfully do so. But Lean's is the better movie, and the obvious template for every flight-related film from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13. Wings is famous for putting cameras on planes, but the love triangle at the story's center is standard sentimentality.
Still, it's difficult not to see Gary Cooper (as Cadet White) as the consummate aerial daredevil, onscreen for two sexy minutes until he dies in a fiery crash. "Luck or no luck," he says, "when your time comes, you're going to get it." White packs a bar of almond milk chocolate, cultural precursor to Beeman's gum.
The Sound Barrier is about irresponsible men committed to legacies instead of the wives who love them and the children they conceived together: selfishness masking as the greater good. While her test pilot husband takes to the air each afternoon, Susan (Ann Todd) sits in at the local matinee, where she can't hear the engines overhead.
Lean vigorously defends science as the philosophy of progressive men/Modern Man. Engineers talk of "continuous creation." They mean the past, present, and future, encompassed in what a telescope can accomplish, because of how it's made - mirrors and angles - and the people who understood enough to imagine it in the first place. "There were books once that said the earth was flat," a pilot says, just before he volunteers for the mission that will kill him. He sits on the runway in his jet and watches a bird above him, and then the wind as it moves through a field of wheat in the countryside around him.
Tony dies with half an hour to go, and in an incredible follow-up, Leans surveys the wreckage as men with cranes and winches try to excavate the pilot's body from the airplane's crater, deep in the ground: a smear of fuselage and soil, barely anything human at all. Afterwards, Susan lies in bed and stares out her window at the stars. They are worse than any horror movie, unblinking and far away.
posted by NPK at 11:09 AM
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