(3 of 3)
With just about enough material for a good two-reel short, Gallant Journey is padded out to feature length. It is an interesting movie only so long as it sticks to scientific experiment, apparently the only subject that really interested John J. Montgomery. There are excellent shots of the young inventor (Glenn Ford) dreamily studying the flight of gulls and deciding that a man-made plane ought to have curved wings. Some of the cloud-filled photography also has excitement. The rest is padding. The routine romance with an intense young woman named Regina (Janet Blair) appears to have hastened the attack of vertigo which caused the flyer's early death.
Since Montgomery's first experiments were witnessed by neither scientists nor press, he never enjoyed due fame or fortune. Forgetful historians may be less impressed by this earnest, plodding movie biography than by the $10,000 concrete-and-granite Montgomery memorial now being erected by San Diego's Junior Chamber of Commerce.
CURRENT & CHOICE
Sister Kenny. Well-made pro-Kenny biography that blends fact, fiction and propaganda (TIME, Sept. 30).
The Killers. Hemingway's short story, hopped up with a complex plot of violence and doublecross (TIME, Sept. 9).
The Big Sleep. Humphrey Bogart & wife (Lauren Bacall), in Raymond Chandler's thriller (TIME, Aug. 26).
Notorious. Ingrid Bergman and Gary Grant stalk Nazis with Director Alfred Hitchcock (TIME, Aug. 19).
* Authenticated records give the honor to another glider enthusiast, Germany's Otto Lilienthal (1891). More than a century before the Wright brothers combined engine and wings (1903), France's Montgolfier brothers had sent human passengers aloft in a balloon (1783). But man's incorrigible yen to imitate a bird is centuries older. Outstanding unsuccessful experimenters: Greece's mythical Icarus, who flew disastrously high for his wax-stuck feathers; Britain's mythical tenth ruler, King Bladud (father of Lear), who tried it with plumes and knitted wings but had fatal air-current trouble; Leonardo da Vinci, who designed a theoretically workable aerial propeller, parachute and helicopter, but whose wing-flapper plane (1489) made a permanent cripple of his assistant, Zoroastro.