Inspired by the 1933 musical Flying Down to Rio, Rosalie Schwartz’s cultural history of aviation, film, and tourism discovers fascinating connections among these three industries that not only developed contemporaneously — the year 1927, for example, witnessed both Charles A. Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight and the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer — but together ushered in an “entertainment century” (p. 6) defined by the globalization of U.S. capital and culture.
The film, which Schwartz calls “an interpretive key to the twentieth century” (p. 7), centers around a romance between an American man (Gene Raymond) and a Brazilian woman (Dolores Del Rio), yet it embodies a larger cultural romance with flight — signifier of modernity, technological progress, and, in the context of the Depression, fantasies of escape. It is no accident, Schwartz argues, that so many 1930s movies featured airplanes; Hollywood and the aviation and tourism industries were natural allies....
