The Spirit of St. Louis

When people think of the great Billy Wilder films they often forget to mention this one. A great picture that tells the story of the flight, certain events in Lindbergh's life, how he came to make the flight, the design and building of the plane, his association with the people who helped make it happen and even some of the trademark Billy Wilder humor. Visit your local fish market get some Sanddabs (if they have them, they're a California fish) fry em up and sit back and enjoy a great movie about one of the great accomplishments of this century with one of the greatest actors of this century in the lead role. The wide screen version is tops.

Jimmy Stewart made films that were always watchable, with an amazing variety from the quirky Harvey to the dark Vertigo & even as far as supplying a voice for the cartoon American Tail. Unlike others (Ronald Regan & John Wayne to name but two) he wasn't afraid to fight for his country either & his experience as a USAF pilot during WW2 served him well for this epic.

The central problem for the film makers is the 30 hour flight, there simply wasn't enough material to depict this, the most famous episode of the whole story & the whole reason behind the legend. The use of the flashback here is entirely reasonable & to be expected as a result.

What does annoy me is the fact that he wasn't the first to fly non stop across the Atlantic. He WAS the first to fly SOLO & the first to fly non stop to Paris, but he just wasn't first to fly across the Atlantic non stop. Alcock & Brown flew across, non stop, in 1919, some 8 years before Lindnergh. Don't forget 8 years may not seem much but consider that in 8 years we went from the Mk1 Spitfire to the almost supersonic Sabre jet! Also the Vivkers Vimy bomber Alcock & Brown used was World War 1 surplus equipment, running on gasoline that had more in common with used dishwater. Yet this achievement is side stepped by Hollywood & simply ignored, yet if it was Lindbergh who'd crawled out to chip ice off the wings of his aircraft time after time we'd never have heard the end of it (a daring feat necessary because the Vimy kept accumulating too much ice to keep flying during a storm).

Useful, this film is an incomplete picture, as carefully framed in it's story line as the the impressive camera work. It does, however, continue to present a skewed view of history.

Someone once said to me that there are only four basic movie plots: the first, boy meets girl: the second, man against apparently insuperable odds: the others.....I can't remember. Although I am not by nature agoraphobic, I guess when it comes to cinema I prefer the cosily domestic to wide open spaces. Every so often, however, I find myself responding to man battling it out against the elements, particularly if the point is being made that, without the sheer determination of an individual to grapple with prejudice and ignorance, civilization would not gain a pace or two forward. Billy Wilder's epic of human endeavour, "The Spirit of St. Louis", is just such an instance. It is heaps better than most in this category mainly through the excellent central performance by James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, the first successful transatlantic flyer. True, Stewart was twice the age of the man he was portraying but he brilliantly manages the demeanour of a much younger person and has the advantage of being one of the very few actors able to convey the determined obsessive fanaticism that Lindbergh must have possessed. One can admire Wilder's skill in sustaining audience interest throughout what is essentially a one character and a one scene film but he achieves it through interspersing the present from the night before the takeoff, with flashbacks that retell the background to the mission, each a little story in itself, some quite tense such as Lindbergh's adventurous flight during a blizzard when he was a flying mail courier and others rather droll such as giving a flying lesson to a priest who is the most incompetent would-be aviator ever. The main journey once it gets going is mainly smooth and something of a leisurely travelogue with nice views over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on the way. Far more dramatic is the takeoff during foul weather from a rain drenched runway in which Stewart grapples with his tiny aircraft narrowly clearing pylons and a clump of trees. The miracle that so flimsy a machine could make it not only for a few miles but across a vast ocean is reinforced by the hazardous implications of this wonderfully atmospheric sequence in a way that make the journey and the arrival in Paris quite uplifting.

Jimmy Stewart is Charles Lindbergh in "The Spirit of St. Louis," a 1957 film directed by Billy Wilder and based on Lindbergh's book about his transatlantic flight.

The film deals with little else but Lindbergh's career up to and including his monumental flight from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget in France in 33 hours back in 1927. We see Lindbergh as a mail pilot, then attempting to raise funds to buy a plane, though a plane ended up being built by a small aircraft company. And then the flight itself - and Wilder somehow makes it suspenseful and interesting. He really captures the pilot's complete isolation with no copilot or radio, talking to himself (Stewart provides the narration), sleep-deprived, with only the sound of the plane for company, falling asleep at the wheel, and finally, unsure where he was and using map topography to figure it out. It's an amazing story. During the flight sequence, there are flashbacks to earlier points in Lindbergh's life.

The Spirit of St. Louis is replicated, and once seen, it's very hard to believe it got out of Roosevelt Field. Lightweight, Lindbergh made sure it carried only the absolute essentials and refused to even bring a parachute or radio because of the extra weight.

Today, for me anyway, James Stewart is just James Stewart, one of the great film stars and actors. I'm blissfully unaware of his age most of the time, and I was in this film as well. For me, he was tall, lanky Lindbergh, determined to succeed and very likable. I realize that John Kerr was offered the role first, but if he had taken it, the film would have flopped initially, as it did starring Stewart, due to the huge budget, but I don't believe it would hold up as well as it does today.

Heroes are very rarely discussed as human beings, and many of their words and actions are taken out of context and out of the era. Lindbergh was ahead of his time in his environmental and aeronautical pursuits and very much of his time in some of his political beliefs. And as we now know, fidelity wasn't one of his strong points. Reading an excellent, well-researched biography like Scott Berg wrote is preferable to making snap judgments. Hindsight is easy.

Complicated men have complicated lives. You don't achieve what Lindbergh did in the Spirit of St. Louis by being ordinary. Wilder does an excellent job in showing his crowning achievement, and in evoking the excitement people felt at the time.

It's 1927. Charles 'Slim' Lindburgh (James Stewart) is flying the trans-Atlantic non-stop solo. As he tries to get some restless shut eye, he recalls his earlier job flying intrepid mail runs. He struggles to pull the flight together facing many obstacles and doubts.

James Stewart is once again an affable regular guy. It's what makes the character compelling. He isn't superhuman as much as a human with perseverance. He's older than the actual Lindburgh during the flight. The movie itself is a bit long at over two hours. It works fine until the plane takes off for the journey. The mirror is probably the best moment and the movie kind of coast from then on. The inner monologue is a good idea but it may be overused. The movie somewhat runs out of fuel but it has a gentle landing. It's nevertheless nice to see the plane.