“The film was budgeted at $ 650.000, the biggest investment Columbia had ever made and a real gamble considering the tenuous state of the business. Making Dirigible was Harry Cohn’s attempt to put Columbia on an equal commercial footing with the major studios” (Joseph McBride). Aviation cinema and cinema of attractions: the oval shapes of dirigibles and the round forms of balloons meet in the sky like in a modern abstract painting; from the windows of an aircraft, the camera lingers on the spectacular skyline of New York City and Statue of Liberty; the crack-up in which Jack Holt’s dirigible collapses is so well shot that “Variety” describes it as “more interesting even than the explosion in Hell’s Angels”. For the most part, the movie revolves around the usual manly competition between friends, this time with exploration and not war as a backdrop: who will reach the South Pole first, the mature Holt who puts all his hopes in the elegant ‘lighter than air’ dirigible or the young, intrepid plane pilot Ralph Graves? And who will win the heart of Fay Wray, the wife of one but loved by both, and who will be man enough to help her make the right decision? (Two friends fighting over the same woman seems to be a requisite for films about planes, from Capra’s earlier Flight to Only Angels Have Wings to A Guy Named Joe/Always). “Dirigible is one of Capra’s most classic romances, a bench test with wich we can measure his films to come… This particular kind of romantic hero, the disillusioned dreamer, will come up again in a considerable number of films, from American Madness to The Bitter Tea of General Yen, from It’s a Wonderful Life to State of the Union” (Leland Pogue). The film’s story was written by aviator Frank ‘Spig’ Wead, who wrote a number of screenplays between the 1930s and 1940s, the most memorable of which is They Were Expendable for John Ford. In 1957, ten years after Wead’s death, Ford made a moving tribute film to the screen- writer, The Wings of Eagles.

Paola Cristalli