Flying Down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers

Abstract

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. “[M]ovie newsreels would provide millions of people their first glimpse of an airplane, and airplanes would enliven feature film narratives with daring stunts. Movie locations would tempt viewers to travel, and airplanes would fly them to their destinations” (p. 49). Meanwhile, films like Flying Down to Rio glamorized and domesticated international travel, transforming flying into a safe, even sexy, leisure activity and depicting places like Brazil as charming and colorful tourist playgrounds.This symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and aviation extended beyond the images on the screen to the corporations behind it. Schwartz uncovers ties between RKO, the studio that produced Flying Down to Rio, and Pan American Airways, whose planes were prominently featured in the movie. RKO production chief Merian C. Cooper, a lifelong aviation enthusiast, sat on Pan Am’s board of directors, and both RKO and Pan Am used FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy to expand their operations in Latin America. Due largely to the efforts of these two companies, U.S. films filled Latin American screens at the same moment that U.S. planes filled Latin American skies. Fittingly, Flying Down to Rio symbolized its message of “hemispheric friendship” (p. 299) through the wedding of Raymond and Del Rio aboard a Pan Am Clipper. Schwartz also notes that RKO released the film in December 1933, the same month that secretary of state Cordell Hull, in a speech before the Seventh Pan American Conference in Montevideo, identified tourism as the essence of Good Neighborly relations and pledged U.S. aid to develop Latin American transportation and communications.So how did the film Flying Down to Rio affect cultural relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbors? Unfortunately, Schwartz does not answer this question, in part because she relies exclusively on U.S. sources and in part because of her curious periodization: the year of the film’s release, 1933, marks the end, rather than the beginning, of her story. Working backward from this point, the bulk of Schwartz’s book deals with the film’s “prehistory,” the concurrent invention and development of flight, cinema, and mass tourism in the early twentieth century. Although this retrospective view aims to establish cultural context for the film, it ultimately confuses, rather than clarifies, the book’s main narrative. Schwartz confines her most interesting and original material — her discussion of the film’s relation to the Good Neighbor Policy — to the final chapter. The preceding chapters contain mostly descriptive retellings of familiar stories (the pioneering exploits of the Wright Brothers, the virtual tourism of the World’s Fairs) that are peripheral to Schwartz’s own arguments.Meanwhile, the book implies, but does not develop, questions that are central to understanding the history of U.S. – Latin American relations in the twentieth century. In her introduction, Schwartz identifies aviation, film, and tourism as manifestations of a global entertainment culture that by the mid-1930s had “gained ascendancy as a shaper of people’s behavior and expectations and as a determinant of social values” (pp. 4 – 5). If this is true, did entertainment replace, transform, or merely reinforce older forms of U.S. global power? What is the relationship between entertainment and empire? How did films like Flying Down to Rio represent international relations to audiences in the U.S. and abroad, especially in terms of gender (which Schwartz briefly addresses) and race (which she does not)? A deeper analysis of the film’s reception, as well as a more sustained engagement with current scholarship on culture and empire, would have enabled Schwartz to offer more-satisfying responses to the important questions that her book inevitably raises.Regardless of such criticisms, the book Flying Down to Rio is as richly textured a journey as is its namesake film. Like Schwartz’s previous work, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997), it reflects great enthusiasm and intellectual creativity and will appeal to both popular and scholarly audiences.