Classics of the air being scarce—or psychological, like Exupery's "Vol de Nuit"—Hollywood has had to hack out its own extrovert sagas without benefit of prosodists, which it has done pretty well so far, and "Men With Wings," or something like it, was inevitable, writes Idwal Jones to the New York "Times." Most basic industries on the upbeat, with colour in them, are due for the routine of "cavalcading." The method isn't new. Long before Coward there was Milestones," which gave 4 panorama of sea-passenger traffic from windjammers to the natant Ritz with its ov n orchid jungles and banks of el tors, by implication anyway.
But any thi que wouldn't do for the screen. There would have io be at every inch the impact the real—from gliders to the present ficent bloom of aircraft, with ulptured wings, with tremendous engines at each tip and squads of trim, well-toothed and self-sufficient air stewardesses. A lot of real. mechanical progress has been packed into the 35 years since the Wrights began flying at Kitty iw So Paramount is telling the yarn, starting from scratch, and doing it all in technicolour. A six months' job, at a cost that you may be assured is prodigious. Some quite stirring a cirrhu s cloud the tint of mon yonnaise e, Wellman got one or two above Ca lina at s For two months ug depended on the whims of the heavens. Wellman's manager had to phone every mori ing to broadcasting stations, ai jrports and the telescope people at Mount Wilson and Palomar to see if t port. The obliging. if the astor was alw hey had any cloud: s to re-observatories were most They never shut down, and onomers were asleep, there ys the itor or the furnace-man to report what was at Tpen the manager had fo ring pi 40 "mechanic: a stage the actors, all com; arose at a.m.
bef ore their jolt of caffeine, load t into buses at the studio, ud deliver them within the vicinity of a cloud perhaps 75. r We- shou ald like to descri e what those fliers were in the skat laing two miles up on a in beam. popping and pitting: out of cloud. out red flam ud dropping 1 ike shot It was mystifying to us, but they knew what they were about and so did Wellman, lying flat on his b. eyes g lued to a hi ocular microphone. na grumph into. a Every aviator about that cloud. even in the wheeziest pre-Richthofen plane, had radio bellowing g in his After an hour, the older si ffs
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.