The years in between the world wars are extensively thought about the Golden Age of flight. In the midst of it, Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, air races were wildly popular, airplane were making big strides in efficiency and security and guest flights were available, if not inexpensive. Americans couldn’t get enough of planes and this was shown in the pop culture, no more so than in motion pictures.By 1930, Howard Hughes’ well-known Hell’s Angels World War I fighter pic had the sound of roaring Liberty engines and Lewis guns to accompany what was then groundbreaking aerial footage. Throughout the exact same duration– 1933– Thornton Freeland directed what became an iconic, airplane-centric feature called Flying Down to Rio. It starred, to name a few, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first-ever screen pairing. They made eight more movies together.The movie connected here is the trailer and builds on the thinnest of cinema pretexts. The Rio hotel has no home entertainment license so the storyline phases a chorus program entirely atop airplanes flying overhead, while band leader Fred Ayres( Astaire )carries out and Ginger Rogers as Honey Hale leads the chorus from the turtledeck of a Buhl Bull Puppy. The majority of the chorus line struts atop a Douglas M-1 Mailplane and a Fairchild FC-1, however the well known Lockheed Vega likewise makes a short appearance.For its day, the cinematic effects developed by Linwood G. Dunn were spectacular and frankly, almost 90 years later on, they don’t hold up too severely.
Today, this would be done digitally with chroma keying or computer-generated imagery, but Dunn utilized a technique called taking a trip matte. The airplane were placed on an install above a featureless background. The dancers in fact danced and were shot from the suitable angles. The second part of the matting shot was the moving background and each shot had to be composited frame by frame into the last print. It was pricey and lengthy and similar to animation.(Unknown is how the dancers kept their heels from piercing the aircraft fabric.) Flying Down to Rio was among a couple of dozen so-called pre-code movies. That’s why it contains some pretty racy video footage of braless dancers and dresses ripped off by the
slipstream. By mid-1934, the Catholic church agitated for enforcement of the Hays Code and depictions of sexual idea, criminal immorality and violence were scrubbed from movies. Prohibition ended that year, so even if you could not be titillated you could at least get hammered legally.Contemporary films are famous for”brand combination “of industrial items. BMW writes a huge look for an appearance in a Bond movie, Coca-Cola spends millions to appear on the table in a restaurant scene.
Absolutely nothing new here. The newly formed Pan Am Airlines was heavily associated with Flying Down to Rio and a Pan Am Sikorsky S-40, complete with logo, is prominently showcased in the film. Also prominent is an Astaire-Rogers dance number. It’s not in the trailer, but see it here. It’s not bad, but I like this one better from Swing Time. You can also purchase or rent the complete feature on YouTube.
Source: https://www.avweb.com/multimedia/when-airplanes-ruled-the-movies/