IT'S A BIG YEAR for Amelia Earhart on-screen.
In the "Night at the Museum" sequel Amy Adams played America's favorite missing aviatrix for laughs. In "Amelia," Hilary Swank plays her in hopes of another best actress Oscar.
"Amelia" continues a long Hollywood tradition: the daring aviator movie. Over the years, there have been aviation movies galore: World War II ones ("Twelve O'Clock High," "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"), Cold War ones ("Firefox," "Top Gun"), passenger plane ones ("The High and the Mighty," "Airport"), even comedies (yes, "Airplane!").
But daring aviator movies are the top-of-line model, the granddaddy of them all, the genre at its most heroic and definitive. Propellers spin, contact is made, silk scarves flap in the prop wash. Such movies can be as old as "Wings," winner of the first best picture Oscar (called "best production" back then) or as recent as Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator."
The genre is part of Hollywood's DNA. The film industry and the aviation industry grew up together in Southern California (Lockheed and Warner Bros., for example, moved to Burbank the same year, 1928). Howard Hughes was far from alone in having such a strong attraction to both building planes and making movies.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that such directors as Howard Hawks and William Wellman were fliers in World War I. The difference between flight crew and film crew was smaller than you might think.
Almost exact contemporaries, motion pictures and heavier-than-air flight are classic examples of sleek technological glamour. Does it sound odd to speak of the early days of aviation as "glamorous"? Cole Porter equated "Flying too high with some guy in the sky" with a "kick from cocaine." And few if any movie stars have been bigger celebrities than Charles Lindbergh.
Like Earhart, Lindbergh has a biopic, too, "The Spirit of St. Louis." Although it may have the most famous subject, it's far from the best aviation film. Here's a selective guide.
"THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS" (1957) Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic is a great movie subject, right? Thrilling story, famous event, legendary protagonist. All true enough, except that dramatizing a man's 33 hours alone in a cramped space is not the easiest thing to do. What director Billy Wilder and co-scenarist Wendell Mayes hit upon was Lindbergh (James Stewart) talking with a fly he finds in his cockpit. That's right, a fly. When it was suggested that Stewart might reject such a bizarre plot device, Wilder disagreed. "Mr. Stewart does not object to talking with insects. After all, he has had to deal all his life with agents and producers." He also had to deal with the fact he was more than two decades older than the Lone Eagle was when he made his flight. The movie flopped.
"ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS" (1939) Cary Grant is in charge of a ragtag bunch of pilots battling treacherous weather, and each other, as they haul mail over the Andes. Somehow Jean Arthur, at the height of her girlish adorability, ends up in their midst. So does Grant's ex-flame (Rita Hayworth), who's now married to a disgraced pilot (Richard Barthelmess). And did we mention that Thomas Mitchell, as another pilot, is going blind? The result is aerial derring-do at its on-screen best. Hawks directed, and it's Hawks at his most Hawksian. The men are handsome and tough, the women are beautiful and even tougher, and the dialogue (courtesy of Jules Furthman) has the crackle of a Spitfire's wing guns.
"CEILING ZERO" (1936) More high-altitude Hawks. It's a toss-up which is more bizarre: the pencil-thin mustache worn by James Cagney's character, a hot-shot flier, or the character's name, Dizzy Davis. Of course it could be worse. He could have been named Crash Davis, which might be fine for baseball catchers (just ask Kevin Costner), but not for pilots. "Ceiling Zero" is standard '30s Warner Bros.: a cocky hero, a straight-arrow best friend (Pat O'Brien), and a comeuppance for the cockiness. Even so, few Warners movies back then had a de-icing device as a key plot element.
"THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER" (1975) When is a World War I dogfight not a World War I dogfight? Why, when it doesn't take place during World War I! Robert Redford is a 1920s barnstormer who can't get over the fact he missed out on flying in the Great War. He also can't get over how unsuited Susan Sarandon turns out to be for wing-walking. Lucky for him he encounters a famous German ace when he becomes a stunt pilot in Hollywood. This was the movie that reunited George Roy Hill and William Goldman, the director and writer of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Maybe it would have been better if Paul Newman had played the ace. Redford turned out to look a lot more comfortable at the controls of a biplane in "Out of Africa."
"THE TARNISHED ANGELS" (1958) Another disgruntled barnstormer movie, this one based on William Faulkner's novel "Pylon." Faulkner said this was the best film adaptation of any of his works (considering the competition, that's not as much of a compliment as it might sound). Robert Stack is the pilot. Dorothy Malone is his wife. Rock Hudson is the journalist whose arrival on the scene to write a story about Stack seriously complicates matters for all concerned. The three of them were on hand two years earlier for "Written on the Wind." Douglas Sirk directed both pictures, and his presence counts for a lot more than theirs. Mise-en-scene, you might say, is the filmic equivalent of flying in formation.
"WINGS" (1927) The World War I aviation movie qualifies as its own genre. "Hell's Angels" (1930) and the two versions of "The Dawn Patrol" (1930 and 1938) are among the best-known. It's still with us, in fact. Consider, if you must, "Flyboys" (2006), about the Lafayette Escadrille. But the one that started it all - and which certainly boasts the cleanest, clearest, most irreducible title - is "Wings." Fliers Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen are both in love with Clara Bow. A mistaken-identity dogfight resolves the love triangle. Perhaps the most startling thing about "Wings" is that Gary Cooper was seventh-billed.
"THE AVIATOR" (2004) In no other movie are aviation and film so breathlessly braided together. You'd think its director, Scorsese, had spent as much of his boyhood making model airplanes as he did watching old movies on TV. The real-life hero of "The Aviator," Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), was both movie mogul and aviation mogul. The movie begins with the making of a movie ("Hell's Angels"). Its characters include such movie stars as Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani), and Errol Flynn (Jude Law). One man's red carpet is another's tarmac - just so long as there are no germs.
"SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW" (2004) Looking snazzy indeed in goggles and oxygen mask, Jude Law plays a dashing pilot in "Sky Captain." Is it any wonder ace newspaper reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) still smarts over their fizzled love affair? Or, more to the point, that he's able to jump into his P-40 and almost single-handedly defeat the dark machinations of Dr. Totenkopf (Laurence Olivier)? Well, he does have some considerable assistance from eyepatch-wearing Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) and her airborne aircraft carrier.
"THE ENGLISH PATIENT" (1996) Call it a daring nurse movie or daring sapper movie or daring spy movie or daring geographer movie or daring lover movie or even a daring burn victim movie. But a daring aviator movie it's not. That said, perhaps no other film has captured so well the thrilling sense of liberation that flight in a small airplane can bring. It also captures, not once but twice, how disastrous the consequences can be when a plane suddenly and violently descends to all-too-solid ground.
"NORTH BY NORTHWEST" (1959) All right, by no means is it an aviation movie. If anything it's a train movie (an even richer film transportation genre). Still, "North by Northwest" boasts what is surely the greatest sequence featuring an open-cockpit plane - probably any kind of plane - in movie history. When that crop duster goes after Cary Grant out in the middle of some Illinois farmland, it's as if the Wright brothers went to Kitty Hawk with just this purpose in mind. It's that perfect a use of an engine and pair of wings to slip the surly bonds of earth.