And only the dead will be dancing with me

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[davidgillon]

There must have been some unstated reason (inter-company politics most likely) they didn't talk to either Imperial Airways, who had the fully surveyed Kangaroo Route from London to Australia for the Empire Class flying boats, or KNILM, who had had a fully surveyed route from the Netherlands to Java before the Germans invaded, and who were still operating in the Dutch East Indies. 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.

[moon_custafer]

That was the flying, more-or-less civilian version of Anabasis, wasn’t it?

[choco_frosh]

Dear Hollyood, please make a movie of the California Clipper

< Reads about the truly ridiculous circumstances for like ten minutes, to the extreme detriment of actual work >

D'ac, but that almost sounds like less "movie" than "$%^*& miniseries". Wow.

I regret only that it couldn't be filmed with a real plane, because the last Boeing 314 Clipper was scrapped in 1951.

On the other hand, if you built a new one, I bet you could totally sell it afterwards to some dieselpunk enthusiast who'd been trying to decide whether he wanted a yacht or a private plane.
ETA: The cost of actually building one would probably be prohibitive: I forgot the "roughly the size of a 727" thing.
Uhhh...it worked for Waterworld? ohwait.

[gwynnega]

I haven't seen The Dybbuk since 1990 or so. I really should see it again.

There definitely should be a movie about the California Clipper saga. Wow.

[moon_custafer]

Uh-oh, now I have “Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines” stuck in my head.