Coast to Coast in 48 Hours

Charles Lindbergh was born on February 4th, 1902. If you can't find a copy of The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), with Jimmy Stewart, there are plenty of documentary films (Movietone-like stuff), on YouTube. These documentary films show the real-life footage of what Billy Wilder's film expressed, about Lindbergh's life, albeit in biopic form. This film, Coast to Coast in 48 hours (1929), was made at the start of the talkie era, but shows a true professional use of sound techniques. The music and voice-over tracks are done quite well for the dawn of the talkies. The main goal of this film is to act as an advertisement for Lindbergh and his business partners, new money-making venture, a coast-to-coast passenger air service from New York to Los Angeles, which also includes some train travel.

However, being 1929, the only way to show this advertisement, was to use the traditional form of projecting the film onto a screen. There was no TV or monitors yet, so everything was still displayed cinematically. It's safe to say, that the only way this film could have been shown to audiences would be in an auditorium at the airport or in some local film houses or movie theaters, thus solidifying it as a theatrical motion picture. It's a short one at 18 minutes running time. The paying customers being the passengers and to a lesser extent, the stock-holders. Either way, Coast to Coast in 48 hours (1929), is a great example of a cinematic artifact, that should be seen. It also is surprising technically too.

PMTM Grade: 7.4 (C+) = 7 IMDB.

Used as we are to flying everywhere, it may be hard to realize that in 1929, it was almost as astonishing that an industrial film like this -- a twenty-minute advertisement -- could be a talking picture as to fly from New York City to Los Angeles in a mere two days. You didn't even spend all that time in the air. Instead, you took the train from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Ohio, and then transferred to an airplane, which carried you in hops of between 170 and 300 miles, to the West Coast, pausing to buy souvenirs along the way.

Last month I flew from New York City to San Diego in about six hours. So, yes, there has been some advancement. On the other hand, Charles Lindbergh was not along every step of the way, from the board room prologue, looking confused, to Saint Louis, where he was inspecting every engine, to somewhere over the Rockies, where he flew past, taking a look to make sure my plane was still in one piece. So there's that.

This short was commissioned by Transcontinental Air Transportation, which was later merged into Trans World Airlines, a major carrier when I was young. It shut down in 2001.