8mm Forum: Charles Lindbergh as Brought to You by Blackhawk Films

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Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on May 26, 2017, 05:35 PM:

Charles Lindbergh at Roosevelt Field, May 1927

Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight (1x400’, Silent, B&W, Blackhawk Films)

Lindbergh’s Flight (1x400’, Sound, B&W, Blackhawk Films)

I grew up in a region of Nassau County, Long Island, New York called the Hempstead Plains. This is a flat expanse of sandy soil maybe 5 by 20 miles. A hundred years ago and more it was farmlands and grasslands, one of very few examples of a true prairieland East of the Mississippi.

At the beginning of the 20th century the Brooklyn Bridge had already been built and the Long Island Rail Road had access to Penn Station in Manhattan. By 1903 the Wright Brothers had taken to the air. A flat, almost empty expanse with excellent access to New York City like the ‘Plains were a natural environment for airfields and soon we had a bunch of them. For example, the “Mitchell Field” you see in the movie Pearl Harbor was actually out on the Hempstead Plains. So were Curtiss Field and this other one called “Roosevelt Field”. (Trivia: this wasn’t named after either President Roosevelt, but after Theodore’s son Quentin, who was an Aviator killed in WW1.)

By the time I showed up in 1962, Roosevelt Field had become a shopping mall. J.C. Penney was there and their kid-sized blue jeans wore like iron. This is what I knew about the place when I was a little kid, but there was much more to it than that. Something big had happened there, which means whatever the future holds for that land, it will always be called “Roosevelt Field”.

90 years ago this month, in May, 1927, Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis bumped down a muddy runway out on the Hempstead Plains, barely cleared the power lines at the far end and went on to change not only his own life but the World. Every time we sit packed in coach complaining about the bad food, the weird cutlery and getting ten peanuts in an envelope as some kind of snack, we should think about what Charles Lindbergh went through doing it the first time!

The years since Lindbergh’s flight have seen the rise and fall of the aviation industry here. We had Grumman, Republic Aviation and hundreds of smaller companies. They built some of the great fighter planes of WWII here, especially carrier-based ones. Later they built the F-14 Tomcat, the L.E.M. and the wings for the space shuttles too. When I was in high school electronics my future was certainly going to be as an engineer for Grumman, just like half the engineers that lived here at the time. At the beginning I worked a while for companies that did avionics, but by the late 1980s the glory days were basically over and the stuff I worked on became strictly earthbound.

-I would not get to go to space like Major Nelson…and my hopes of marrying Barbara Eden were becoming ever more distant! (To be young is to dream!)

Today there is a museum of Aviation in an old hangar in Mitchell Field. An aircraft battery charger I worked on in my twenties is in one of the display cases…something about that makes me feel kind of old!

In recent years, when I had the chance to own some films about Lindbergh’s flight, filmed in the very place my pants came from, you bet I grabbed it! These two are those I know about. Who knows? Maybe there are more. Despite almost identical titles they are very different and both worth seeing.

Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight is the silent one. Oddly, it also tells the story the best: all the way from the Wright Brothers to gassing up the Spirit of St. Louis that damp May morning, to the adulation Lindbergh received in Europe and later at home (The US Navy sent a ship to bring him home!). Colonel Lindbergh stands there young and heroic, just a young kid from the Midwest whose life was about to get a whole lot more complicated, often much more than it should have. The print is quite nice, considering the age of the source material the sharpness is pretty good.

My main gripe with it is this film is an easy 500 feet and Blackhawk really should have stepped up to a 600 foot reel. Rewind here is a careful, tense process that can easily go very wrong!

I first encountered Lindbergh’s Flight on the Franchetti Tables at CineSea. I was intrigued by it because it’s a sound print from a pretty silent era. This is an interesting film: actually a real sound film from a few months before the premier of The Jazz Singer. It is almost an entirely separate film from Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight. This one was shot by Fox Films as a newsreel with sound on the morning Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field. That night it premiered at cinemas in New York City. When I say “sound”, I don’t necessarily mean “sync sound”. The image is of the Spirit lumbering off down field and the backs of the crowd watching quietly until they cheer when he finally cleared the utility poles. There is nothing really happening to sync to, but it is an awesome event to see on film. There is a second, truly synced section where Lindbergh has arrived in Washington DC months later and receives the Distinguished Flying Cross from the President. In this case, “Silent Cal” Coolidge actually has sound! He also has a voice worthy of silent film! (Good luck getting elected these days!). Lindbergh doesn’t do particularly better, but then again both of these men were from an age when “media” was basically “print media” and few people ever actually heard them speak.

This one is a little on the dupey side: quite a bit of contrast. The sound has a persistent, low pop about once a second and it’s a little muddy. It pays to remember where and when this came from though. In this case complaining about the image and sound is like opening an ancient tomb and saying “Man! It smells in here!”. It’s enough just to be there at all without getting picky!

Considering the multiple levels of history both these films represent, you can appreciate them regardless of where your Mom bought your jeans!

[ May 26, 2017, 09:47 PM: Message edited by: Steve Klare ]

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