Vacation from Humor

I've stated before how much I generally prefer the Warner Bros. B movies. MGM had the sort of class and production values that made things like highbrow literary adaptations suitable for the studio, while for whatever reason, things like B comedies weren't particularly up MGM's alley. A good example of this is the 1938 screwball comedy Vacation from Love.

Dennis O'Keeffe stars as Bill Blair, a saxophonist in the big band led by Barney Keenan (Edward Brophy in a rather odd casting choice). He's not playing in time or tune with the rest of the band during the rehearsal. The reason for this is that he sees a picture in the paper of socialite Patricia Lawson (Florence Rice), who is about to be married. She was apparently recently in the nightclub where the band plays, and Bill immediately fell in love with her without even having talked with her. So Bill vows that he's going to see her again.

To this end, Bill drags Barney along to the house where the wedding is going to be held, commits a ruse to get somebody else's invitation, and walks in to where the wedding is taking place. When the bit about "speak now or forever hold your piece" comes up, Bill speaks up. Patricia's father (Reginald Owen) is none too pleased for fairly obvious reasons. But his daughter is an absolute ditz, and is willing to listen to what Bill has to say. Now, in this sort of movie, it's already obvious that the would-be groom in this sequence is going to be a total drip, so Patricia decides Bill is right, and is willing to run off with him and get on the boat to Europe where she and the original groom were going to be in the honeymoon suite. They get married with the vows being love, honor, and obey -- and have fun doing it.

Patricia's dad gives his new son-in-law Bill a job at his advertising agency, and Bill proves to be adept at it. Except that the job requires a lot of travel, so he's away from his wife and misses a lot of social engagements of the sort that rich people in the 1930s go to. And then, one day, Barney shows up at the ad agency's office with the band's singer Flo (June Knight). This is just about the same time when Bill and father-in-law get an important client to re-up with the agency so the four go out on the town to celebrate. Unfortunately, it's also Bill and Patricia's first wedding anniversary, so she's brought a lot of people over to celebrate. When Patricia gets so angry at Bill that she won't let him in her bedroom to explain what happened, Bill decides to take Barney up on his offer and start playing sax in the band again on the band's European tour.

Patricia follows in the hopes of getting a divorce, because French divorce laws are presented as somehow more permissive. But once again, this is the sort of movie where we know that the male and female leads are going to wind up together in the final reel, so we know that something is going to stop the divorce from going forward.

The premise behind Vacation from Love is totally nonensical. That, and the characters, certainly Bill and to a lesser extent Patricia, seem to have radical changes to their personalities over the course of the movie. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's also the sort of material where you want to take the main characters and smack them upside the head to knock some sense into them. Thankfully, this being a B movie, it's over fairly quickly and you haven't wasted too much time.

Sterling Hayden, Frenchman

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Sterling Hayden. Once again, TCM ran some new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record, such as The Golden Hawk.

Opening titles inform us that in the 17th century, England and Spain were allied together against France, at least against France. There were, however, some people who engaged in piracy for their own sake of adventure.... One such pirate is Kit Gerardo (Sterling Hayden), based on the French island of Basse-Terre (part of Guadeloupe) where he romances the ladies and talks about plundering loot with the men who would be sailing under him. One such boat is the Spanish boat the Garza, sailing out of the big Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena captained by Luis del Toro (John Sutton).

In the middle of the fight against the Garza, a captive woman jumps overboard to escape del Toro and make her way over to Kit's boat. The woman (played by Rhonda Fleming) is a Dutch maid named Jane and therefore neutral, or at least that's her story at first, even though she doesn't have a Dutch accent. (Then again Sterling Hayden doesn't have a French accent.) In any case, the libidinous Kit immediate starts trying to put the moves on Jane, who understandably suspects Kit of trying to keep her captive. So she escapes from Kit just like she escaped del Toro.

As you might guess, Kit, Jane, and del Toro keep running into each other. Jane is also known as Captain Rouge, and wants to plunder other ships herself because she claims her family used to be wealthy but had their wealth stolen from them and she's only trying to take back what's rightfully theirs. She's also not really got any allegiances to anybody but herself, which will prove useful later in the film.

Kit keeps plundering and eventually takes a woman named Blanca de Valdiva (Helena Carter, no relation to Helena Bonham Carter) who claims to be betrothed to del Toro. And yet Kit immediately starts romancing her too despite her story about being betrothed. Action shifts all around the Caribbean as Kit also continues to search for Captain Rouge while also making war on the Spaniards.

Ultimately, Kit tries to invade one of the Spanish fortresses, which is going to put him in a lot more danger, leading up to the climax in which all the relationships are revealed and, as you might guess, the heroes come out all right in the end.

The synopsis of The Golden Hawk is, to be honest, a bit bare bones. That's largely because the movie is fairly formulaic. It's an entertaining enough movie, and the cinematography is actually quite gorgeous although nowhere near the Caribbean. There's nothing much new here, and that's part of the reason why the movie isn't so well remembered today. Still, you'll probably enjoy it for one watch.

Summer Under the Stars 2026

Today being July 31, it's time for the annual reminder that tomorrow begins TCM's annual Summer Under the Stars programming feature. As always, each day in August is given over to the films of a different actor or actress.

Looking through the schedule, I see several movies on the schedule that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't done posts on, so I already know what's going to get posts on certain days coming up. As always, check your schedule since I've got a couple of weeks of posts already scheduled and seeing what films are on my DVR means moving stuff around.

Summer Under the Stars also means that some of the other programming features are taking a break for the month of August. That includes Noir Alley, Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports, and Dave Karger's Saturday matinee musicals. There's been a summer theme kicking off Sunday afternoons with a romance movie, presented by Alicia Malone, although TCM's article for some reason says it's on Saturdays. In any case, the five Sunday afternoons in August all kick off with relatively romantic movies. I don't know if Alicia Malone is presenting those.

TCM's page for Summer Under the Stars is up and running.

Personality clash rom-com 57894276804278507

A very common trope in movies about romances is the way in which the two characters can have totally different personality types, with one being a free spirit and the other fairly strait-laced. Another movie of this type that I saw recently is Ginger in the Morning.

Sissy Spacek plays the free-spirited hippie-ish young woman, named Ginger; as the movie opens we see her hitch-hiking through New Mexico trying to get to Colorado Springs where she has a boyfriend working at the Air Force Academy. Cut to Albuquerque, where an airplane is landing. Getting off at the airport are Joe (Monte Markham) and Fred (David Doyle who gets a surprisingly high credit considering he's only in this one scene before the opening credits even show up). It's intimated that Joe has recently gotten a divorce and, with New Year's coming up, Fred is suggesting that Joe ought to be looking for a woman to spend the holiday with. Get back into the dating scene, although Fred is trying to present himself as the sort of man who considers himself God's gift to women.

Now, as you might guess, Joe comes across Ginger out on the road, and decides to pick her up. However, he engages in a series of lies about his real situation, saying he's driving up to Denver for business and similar things before saying he's got a friend who would happily him borrow the friend's house for the holiday. This is, of course, Joe's own house, where he spends time being an amateur artist while not working at whatever executive type job he has out in the real world. The two talk and seem to be OK with each other's company, and spend the night together although it's not made clear how far they go.

Things go wrong the following morning. Charlie (Mark Miller) served with Joe in Korea, before going back to ranching in Texas and starting a family of his own, although, like Joe, Charlie's marriage ended in divorce. In Charlie's case, however, it's because of his drinking, which causes all sorts of obvious problems. Among the problems is showing up unannounced at his old buddy's house to celebrate the new year, which irritates Ginger for obvious reasons. Now here, I was frankly hoping that the plot twist would be that Joe and Charlie were both gay as it certainly would have made for an intriguing movie. Instead, the plot twist is that Charlie's ex Sugar (Susan Oliver) calls up from the airport in Albuquerque saying tht she's got a layover. Since Charlie has screwed up Joe's assignation with Ginger, Joe decides he's going to get revenge on Charlie by setting him up with Sugar, only without telling him that it's Ginger he's going to pick up from the airport.

Things get complicated from here, although as I was watching the movie I kept expecting there to be the typical Hollywood happy ending. That ending does more or less occur, but I wonder how long all of the four principals would continue to be happy after the closing credits. Ginger in the Morning is an interesting enough premise, and clearly the sort of movie that couldn't have been under the Production Code. However, it also felt to me like the sort of film that hasn't dated all that well, in part because Ginger and Joe come across more like character types than fully fleshed-out human beings. The other thing that made Ginger in the Morning a bit difficult to love is that Charlie is a rather obnoxious character, from the time he shows up to when he starts getting way too drunk for his own good.

If you want to see a look at the cultural values of the first half of the 1970s, along with some nice location shooting in New Mexico, you could do a lot worse than Ginger in the Morning. But at the same time, there's a reason this is the sort of movie I had never heard of before it ran on TCM.

Rambling Rose

Actress Diane Ladd died late last year, and TCM did the requisite prime-time tribute to her. One of the movies that they ran was Ladd's Oscar-nominated performance in Rambling Rose. Not having seen the movie before, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up in 1971, as an adult Buddy Hillyer (John Heard) is driving to his old home town of Glennville, GA, to visit his father (Robert Duvall) who sent him a message asking him to come visit with the implication that there was something important to talk about. As he approaches the old homestead, Buddy starts thinking back to when he was a kid, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression....

So we flash back to 1935. Young Buddy's mom (Diane Ladd) is a woman who apparently inherited some money that the family seems to be living off of, at least in part, because Mom is the sort of woman who was able to attend Barnard (the co-ordinate women's college to Columbia back in the days before official co-education) and is working on a master's thesis in American history. The family also still has the resources to bring in Rose (Laura Dern), a young woman who had a difficult past, to work as the family's maid in exchange for room and board.

Staying with the Hillyers is a way for Rose to escape that past which is implied to be something similar to what Barbara Stanwyck had in Baby Face before heading to New York and sleeping her way to the top. Rose didn't have the wherewithal to get to New York, so instead she's stuck in small town Georgia but still with a large sexual appetite. She kinda-sorta tries to put moves on Dad, which is a bit of an issue, before turning to adolescent Buddy (Lukas Haas) to give him his first sexual experience. But of course all of this presents a bit of a problem for the Hillyers since Dad really ouht to be faithful to Mom, while Buddy is too young to be having sex.

Rose is young and nubile, which makes it natural that she's going to catch the eye of a lot of men in town as well. This causes more problems both in town and at the Hillyer house, especially after one of the men who's interested in Rose is caught in bed with her in the Hillyer house. It might be a bad enough thing if she were spending the night with the guy in town, but bringing him to the house? That's just unconscionable.

So Dad looks for someone else he can fob Rose off on, thankfully having a cousin who will fit the bill. Except that the cousin runs a dairy farm, and Rose has claimed her backstory involves an exceedingly rough childhood on a farm. And if that's not enough, Rose now claims she can't move away anyhow. Nobody will have her since she's pregnant, not having had a period in three months.

Rambling Rose goes on like this, with some pretty good performances, but a story that rather meanders and doesn't really go anywhere until just before the end where the script feels entirely too rushed and has to wrap up a whole bunch of loose ends in the last 10 minutes or so. I certainly didn't hate Rambling Rose, but I didn't quite love it, either.

Duffy of San Quentin

I didn't mean to watch a couple of movies in close succession that had San Quentin as a major plot point, but then that somehow is the one prison in California that came to prominence, much like Sing Sing in New York was at least before the Attica riots of the early 1970s. In any case, after Southside 1-1000, there's also Duffy of San Quentin.

Duffy here is Clinton T. Duffy, a real person who was the warden of San Quentin between 1940 and 1952 and son of a prison guard meaning he grew up knowing a lot about the prison; Duffy is played by Paul Kelly who apparently in real life served a stretch in San Quentin in the 1920s for manslaughter. As the movie opens, the state administration is on another one of its good government drives, trying to clean up corruption, meaning the current warden has got to go. Duffy at this time is only an assistant to the warden, and he's given the task of being interim warden for one month. Duffy knows the head of the guards, Pierson (Horace McMahon), is corrupt too, but Pierson figures he'll outlast any interim warden. Meanwhile, Duffy's wife Gladys (Maureen O'Sullivan) seems like she'd be OK with Duffy leaving San Quentin.

Duffy immediately sets about trying to effect a series of reforms, although there's a question of how much support he's going to be able to get in a limited amount of time and with institutional obstinacy. One thing Duffy can do is to say nobody's going to be a stool pigeon any longer. He also talks directly with an unorthodox prisoner, Harper (Louis Hayward), nicknamed "Romeo". Romeo doesn't fit the standard profile of a prisoner, and yet here he is, and constantly getting into trouble too. He understandably talks about being set up, but then, all the prisoners do.

Another of the reforms Duffy wants to try is to make the prison hospital experience less bad. One way to go about it is to bring in an outisde nurse -- a female nurse. The eventual hiree is Anne Halsey (Joanne Dru), who is good at what she does, although as you might guess prisoners might not be the most trustworthy people to be around a nurse working as nurse's assistants. Then again, it's also easier work than some of the other details in the prison. Things come to a head when one of the prisoners drinks some "medicinal" alcohol and screws up the treatment of a patient while on duty.

And then, the "good government" brigade shows up again. John Winant (George Macready) is the prosecuting attorney who put Romeo in jail. Not just Romeo, but a whole bunch of other prisoners too. However, it looks like he may have used dishonest and corrupt means to get his convictions, meaning that he's going to face jail time. Putting him in San Quention is a problem since naturally, one might expect there are a lot of prisoners who would like to get their revenge on such a prosecutor much like there are with cops who go to prison. Will Duffy be able to stop people from committing violence against Winant?

Duffy of San Quentin isn't the worst movie out there by any means, although I wonder how accurate this is compared to the real Duffy's time as warden. (Needless to say, I haven't read Duffy's memoirs.) However, the movie also feels relatively formulaic, and as though there's not all that much new going on from all the other prison movies we've seen where the warden is an important character. Duffy of San Quentin is worth one watch, but not much more than that.

Pinky Tomlin

Another of those B movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time TCM ran is is Times Square Lady. But once again, since the plot synopsis sounded interesting enough, I decided I'd record it and give it a go, and since it's only 68 minutes, it wouldn't be as if I wasted much time it it wasn't very good.

Robert Taylor is top billed here, right at the beginning of his career being top-billed, but of course he's not the Times Square Lady. That honor goes to Virginia Bruce, although we don't meet her either in the opening scene. Instead, the opening deals with the sudden death of King Bradley, a promoter who has his fingers in a whole bunch of different sports/entertainment businesses in New York, which are at various points on the spectrum of being maybe illegal. Certainly, the sort of people running them aren't the most ethical.

As for Taylor, he plays Steve Gordon, who manages the Casa Nova, a nightclub that Bradley owned, and which features a new singer fresh from Oklahoma, Pinky Tomlin (playing himself), who had beome big at the time for a song called "The Object of My Affection". Steve has a girlfriend in Margo (Helen Twelvetrees), and a manservant in Mack (Nat Pendleton), who is clearly on the wrong side of the law. Virginia Bruce plays Toni Bradley, who is the daughter of King Bradley but for some reason not clearly mentioned is living in Iowa as the movie opens. Dad's business associates didn't know anything about the daughter, so they're stunned when the will is read and discover that Toni inherits everything.

Their idea to deal with this is one that's not unreasonable. They suspect that Toni won't have any interest in running such businesses, and may not have the acumen to do so. So they're more than willing to buy the businesses out from Toni, in what I think today would be called a leveraged buyout. But of course they also want to get the businesses for the best price they can, which for them is the lowest, before reselling them to a promoter who would pay true market value. Steve's job is to wine and dine Toni, since Steve's the only one with the requisite looks that Toni might fall for. (The rest of them are played by middle-aged character actors you've probably seen in a bunch of 1930s movies.) But, since they're also businessmen with dubious ethics, they're not above doing things like injuring their own hockey players or poisoning dogs at the greyhound track.

But, as you can guess, Steve falls in love with Toni which presents multiple problems. One is that he's got that girlfriend already, while the other one is that the other business associates are going to be none too happy with Steve working with Toni not to sell the businesses. And since they've got those questionable ethics, they're going to use those to try to force Steve and Toni out of the picture if they can.

I titled the post after Pinky largely because I have to admit to not having heard of him before seeing this movie. He didn't have that much interest in the movies and got out of the music business fairly early, going into oil. He gets a substantial subplot here, involving singing a second of his songs in a scene where he also milks a cow. His character isn't really necessary to the story, and it's also easy to see why he didn't have a long movie career. Certainly World War II and the changing tastes that came along would have ended it in any case.

For a bunch of reasons, Times Square Lady turns out to be a mediocre B movie. But again, it's only 68 movies, and seeing how Hollywood deals with this sort of business as it was back in the 1930s is a mildly interesting time capsule.

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!

Back in December, TCM ran a salute to Hanna-Barbera, the animators nowadays better known for their TV show characters like the Flintstones. They had, of course, gotten their starts decades earlier working at MGM in their animated division. But even then, TCM showed movies based on the characters that had become popular on television. One example is Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!.

I assume most people here already know the Yogi Bear character, an anthropomorphic bear (voiced by Daws Butler) in Jellystone Park who pals around with little Boo-Boo (voiced by Don Messick) and making life hell for the park rangers because he's more interested in the park visitors' food than anything else.

As this movie opens, winter is coming to an end and the runoff from the melting snow is what wakes up Boo-Boo, who is excited to wake up Yogi. Yogi immediately sets out to get more food, which again makes him a terror at the park and causes the rangers to want to capture him and send him to a zoo because the rest of the bears are nowhere near as bad. However, Yogi is smarter than the average bear, leading him to come up with a ruse that gets a different bear captured and sent off to the San Diego Zoo. SOmehow, the park rangers don't notice this.

Meanwhile, Yogi has a female bear, Cindy (voiced by Julie Bennett) who is romantically interested in Yogi, even though he doesn't seem to notice since all he can think of is pick-a-nick baskets. She hears that Yogi has been captured, since that's what the rangers believe, and she's devastated. She'll never see Yogi again. So she comes up with the idea that if she can get herself captured too, she will also be sent to the San Diego Zoo where she'll be reunited with Yogi and the two of them can live more or less happily ever after, or at least as happily as you can live in a zoo.

Now, as I mentioned, it wasn't Yogi that was captured. And when Cindy gets herself captured, she doesn't get sent to the San Diego Zoo anyhow. Instead, she's put in a cage and on a train heading to Saint Louis and the zoo there, much to her dismay. Worse, the door of the train car she's on isn't properly closed, which results in her cage falling out of the car and breaking, which gives her a sense of freedom. At least, she's free until she's cought by a couple of dishonest guys from the circus who take her captive in a much worse way.

Yogi and Boo-Boo learn that Cindy has been sent away, and go looking for her, having a bunch of adventures along the way. But once they free her from the circus, how are they going to get back to Jellystone without getting caught by those awful circus people?

Along the way, there are also several musical numbers, because the story had to be padded out to something feature-length. Still, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! is fairly weak in the story department. The Hanna-Barbera animation is also decidedly inferior to what Disney was putting out too, and the songs aren't very good. Still, kids may enjoy Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! even if I didn't think it was ll that good.

Trois Couleurs: Rouge

I've mentioned several times that I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR, to the point that since YouTube TV "deletes" them after nine months I've had several foreign films I didn't get around to watching. One that was just about to expire and that I finally watched was Three Colors: Red, the final film in director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy following Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White.

Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a woman living in Geneva and studying at the university there while paying the bills by doing modeling work. She's got a difficult personal life, revealed in dribs and drabs over the course of the movie, involving a mom who is in England for some reason; a brother who has issues with drugs; and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend Michel. (None of these characters are actually seen, although we hear Michel's voice in phone calls with Valentine.) In a seemingly unrelated incident, law student Auguste drops his law books and meets his girlfriend Karin.

Some time later, Valentine is driving home one evening when a dog runs out in the street and Valentine is unable to avoid hitting the poor dog. Fortunately, the dog has a name tag: Rita, and the address of the dog's owner. So Valentine loads Rita into her car and takes her to Rita's owner, Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph declares that he doesn't want the dog, so Valentine is welcome to keep Rita. Valentine takes Rita to a vet, who informs her that Rita is also pregnant with puppies and is going to make a full recovery.

The next day, Valentine takes Rita for a walk, but she escapes and goes to Joseph's house, which isn't a bad thing since Joseph had sent Valentine money for the vet bill but much too much money so Valentine wants to return some of it. When she goes to see Joseph this second time, she discovers a shocking secret: he likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his neighbors! This is for all sorts of obvious reasons illegal, and the sort of thing that for similarly obvious reasons disturbs Valentine. She plans on telling the neighbors about it, except that when she visits the neighbors, she finds that the daughter of the man on the phone is also listening in, so knows fully well that her father is not exactly faithful.

Eventually, everything comes together when Joseph hands himself over to the law and wouldn't you know it, but the judge at his trial is Auguste, who has had issues of his own with his girlfriend. Joseph takes Rita back although Valentine wants one of the puppies; Joseph and Valentine continue their platonic relationship as Joseph reveals more of his past and why he never married. Eventually there's a sort of twist ending that I won't give away.

Three Colors: Red received a lot of critical praise upon its release, although it was considered ineligible for a Best Foreign Film Oscar due to the Academy's rules on foreign films having to be credited to one country as opposed to international productions like this that don't quite neatly fit into being a film from a certain country. Having said that, I don't quite get the inordinate praise. It's not so much that Three Colors: Red is a bad movie so much as it's the sort of film that doesn't quite go anywhere. It's unbelievably talky, and leads up to an ending that doesn't satisfy. It's certainly competently made, and I can see why some people are going to love it. I just couldn't get all that invested in the characters.

For some values of spirit

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR when I noticed that it was about to get another airing on TCM is The Spirit of St. Louis. That airing comes up tomorrow, July 26, at 5:30 PM, so once again I made a point to watch it in order to be able to schedule a review for the TCM showing.

As you probably know The Spirit of St. Louis is the name of the plane that Charles Lindbergh (played by James Stewart) flew across the Atlantic Ocean in the first non-stop transatlantic flight in May, 1927. This right away brings up two issues with the movie. One is that we know how the movie is going to end, which is that Lindbergh is going to succeed in his attempt to cross the Atlantic, which removes much of the dramatic tension. The other is that Charles Lindbergh was a young 25 when he completed his fight, while James Stewart was 47 at the time of filming, and looks it for the most part despite the horrendously dyed blond hair. It's worse than Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.

The movie opens about a day before Lindbergh takes off. He's already on Long Island, where the flight started, waiting for the weather to clear for take-off. Having time and nothing else to do, Lindbergh starts thinking both about the upcoming flight, and about how he got here. This is the lead-in to the requisite flashback, although since the second half of the movie is the actual flight, the flashbacks don't take up the entire movie. There are, however, multiple flashbacks to various points of Lindbergh's flight.

Lindberg was working as an airmail pilot around 1926 or so when he's forced to land in bad weather and reads a newspaper article about a couple of pilots who had an even worse flight trying to do that transatlantic flight. For several years there had been a prize offered to the first pilot (or pilots if a plane wasn't manned by one person) to make that non-stop transatlantic crossing. This gives Lindbergh the idea that perhaps he could be the pilot to make that flight. Except that he doesn't have enough money to buy a plane of his own and modify it so that it can carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic.

The next section of the movie deals with Lindbergh getting the financial backing to buy a plane, although the contract with the plane manufacturer falls through since they want to pick the pilot. This leads to a different manufacturer being selected, but one based in San Diego. So they have to fly the plane cross country before it can make the actual flight to Paris.

The flight to Paris is going to take about 36 hours and, as there's no autopilot, it means Lindbergh is going to have to stay awake the entire time, which is a significant plot point. Worse is that Lindbergh didn't get enough sleep before taking off. To try to stay awake, Lindbergh has more flashbacks to other points of his flight career, whcih in the movie included a stint in the military as well as stunt flying. In addition to lack of sleep, there are other technical issues that threaten the success of the flight. But as we know, and it's not much of a spoiler, Lindbergh succeeds and becomes a hero.

For me, the big problem with the movie is the fact that we know fully well how it's going to turn out. Also, with half the movie being Lindbergh on the titular plane, there's not a whole lot that can be done to open up the action. Stewart and writer/director Billy Wilder try, but fall into a bunch of Hollywood tropes. I've seen worse, but then again I've also seen better.