Doing the Vatican rag (6/17/06)
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The Lost Zeppelin. [Edward Sloman, 1929.]
On the eve of an expedition by dirigible to the South pole, intrepid commander Conway Tearle discovers his supposedly-devoted wife Virginia Valli sucking face with illmannered lowborn cad Ricardo Cortez at the absurdly elaborate dinner party the local contingent of the Four Hundred are throwing to send them off, shattering his equipoise [and a large metaphorical vase into which he reels in consternation and dismay], and creating a love triangle whose apex remains in Washington while the two other vertices journey across ocean through storm stress and parlous stock footage to the very ends of the earth; where, after a brief victory lap around the buttocks of the world, they turn about and actually make a few hundred miles back to the north before their airship’s engines falter, its surfaces ice up, and [“falling...falling...falling...” taps out the radio operator in poignant Morse] it augers into the unforgiving Antarctic landscape. — Meanwhile, of course, Very Important People In Uniform monitor their transmissions back at the home office, and the guiltstricken wife sits wringing her hands in her drawing room listening to bulletins detailing their progress toward catastrophe on a radio the size of a grand piano while her servants supply her with copious quantities of tea and crumpets.
Presently the survivors stagger out of the wreckage and sally forth to fall one by one into conveniently-situated crevasses, until none remain but the captain [stoic to the last], his rival [rapidly going to pieces], and [the bitch that he can trust] the captain’s faithful dog. When a scout plane happens across the lost adventurers and can carry only one of them back, well, you can guess who decides to sacrifice himself nobly for the betterment of mankind. At least temporarily.
There’s something irresistibly charming about all this retro tech: the beautiful big open Twenties cars, the enormous radios with their huge knobs and glowing vacuum tubes, the airship itself, obviously inspired by the famous Graf Zeppelin, which circumnavigated the globe [on William Randolph Hearst’s nickel] by air — around the world in 21 days! — only a few months before this picture made its debut; the furlined flight suits, the goggled leather flying helmets. But the relentlessly overmannered dialogue — typical of that dismal interval between the introduction of sound and the discovery [thankfully not long-delayed] of Jimmy Cagney, and what Americans really talked like — is a constant reminder that membership in the upper classes was, in this era, coded by bogus British accents and the ponderous carriage and labored mannerisms colonial wannabes thought would make them seem like Really Old Money; and serves to leave, in this case, the summary impression that a big shiny phallic gasbag piloted by a big shiny phallic gasbag has sailed off to a frozen Pole to shrivel and expire. — Not the precis or the epitaph that I, at least, would want to leave behind me.
____________A beautiful mindfuck (6/10/06)
