![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
And only the dead will be dancing with me
I am home from Providence. Autolycus himself supervised the decontamination process, painstakingly ensuring that I smell like him and his sister, not like other cats. The other cats include the Tattooed Lydia, who is longer and more muscular even than the last time I saw her two months ago. She wrestles with Selwyn, who is the size of a small couch; she is having a heroic childhood, like Paul Bunyan or Achilles.
I got back to Boston just in time to meet my mother for Michał Waszyński's The Dybbuk (דער דיבוק, 1937), newly restored by the National Center for Jewish Film and showing as part of their annual film festival. Today would have been my grandmother's ninety-fifth birthday. My first intimation of The Dybbuk was a poster that hung in one of the basements where Congregation Bet Ha'am used to meet, when I went to Friday night services with her; I remember that she or my grandfather or both of them told me the story first. I did not see the movie itself until Brandeis; I hadn't seen it since. I will write about it. Watching that movie hurts like looking at the sea.
Dear Hollywood, please make a movie of the California Clipper and its first commercial circumnavigation of the globe in December 1941 and January 1942, under truly ridiculous circumstances. The story is brimful of heroic engineering, it comes with white-knuckle suspense built in, and while the flight was made during wartime, the enemy was geography and mathematics, so we can skip the stereotyping. There's a home front angle. There's human interest all over the place. I regret only that it couldn't be filmed with a real plane, because the last Boeing 314 Clipper was scrapped in 1951. Otherwise, you would need to invent nothing.
I got back to Boston just in time to meet my mother for Michał Waszyński's The Dybbuk (דער דיבוק, 1937), newly restored by the National Center for Jewish Film and showing as part of their annual film festival. Today would have been my grandmother's ninety-fifth birthday. My first intimation of The Dybbuk was a poster that hung in one of the basements where Congregation Bet Ha'am used to meet, when I went to Friday night services with her; I remember that she or my grandfather or both of them told me the story first. I did not see the movie itself until Brandeis; I hadn't seen it since. I will write about it. Watching that movie hurts like looking at the sea.
Dear Hollywood, please make a movie of the California Clipper and its first commercial circumnavigation of the globe in December 1941 and January 1942, under truly ridiculous circumstances. The story is brimful of heroic engineering, it comes with white-knuckle suspense built in, and while the flight was made during wartime, the enemy was geography and mathematics, so we can skip the stereotyping. There's a home front angle. There's human interest all over the place. I regret only that it couldn't be filmed with a real plane, because the last Boeing 314 Clipper was scrapped in 1951. Otherwise, you would need to invent nothing.
no subject
Inter-company politics plus now having to consider themselves a strategic military resource operating as anonymously as possible? I'm also wondering if they would have had the opportunity, honestly, to consult anyone from either of these airlines before they had to leave Auckland, since everything about this trip seems to have operated on last-minute seat-of-the-pants flying blind—see the way they almost got shot down at Surabaya just because they didn't have the local frequency guides and the call-ahead from Darwin never got through.
They couldn't have used the original Med segments, but IIRC by that time the Kangaroo Route had been diverted to fly via Freetown in Sierra Leone to Khartoum, and Freetown is about the closest point in Africa to Brazil.
I'm pretty sure they used Leopoldville as the jumping-off point for the transatlantic leg because it had an actual Pam Am base: it might be a longer flight, but they could be guaranteed of refueling with 100 octane first.
no subject
The Dutch fighter pilot wanting to shoot them down wasn't completely unreasonable, the Japanese had a four-engined flying boat of the same configuration.
BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Clipper_(1936_film)
no subject
I am almost certainly going to try to track down Ed Dover's The Long Way Home, which the author of the Medium articles cites as a primary source, so if it sheds any light on this question, I will let you know.
The Dutch fighter pilot wanting to shoot them down wasn't completely unreasonable, the Japanese had a four-engined flying boat of the same configuration.
I didn't think it was completely unreasonable on the Dutch pilot's part—just striking that the crew of the California Clipper had to rely on the bases and stations they stopped at to pass the word along for them. (Again, I understand they started from Auckland without the relevant frequency guides, but was there no way to obtain them en route?)
China_Clipper_(1936_film)
Nice! I've never seen that. Definitely falls into the category of movies I would watch just for the technology captured on film, like Frank Capra's Dirigible (1931). I can't say much for that one on the story level, but it's a pre-Code Antarctic adventure movie that now feels like steampunk even though its use of airships is totally historical, because at the time of filming—the summer into fall of 1930, so even before the disaster that ended the Imperial Airship Scheme—they were considered the wave of the aerial future and the script treats them accordingly. Major scenes were filmed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station; the USS Los Angeles doubled as itself and as the fictional U.S. Navy airship whose breakup in a storm eerily and accurately foreshadowed the fate of the USS Akron in 1933. It's a fantastic document of a future that stopped short. It just has a dreadful exploration-romance plot that stars some perfectly talented people; it's not their fault that the movie feels like it's just marking time between the air scenes.
no subject
no subject
It is totally worth watching for the airships! Just if you want to make a sandwich or something during a love scene, you have my blessing.