Snubbing the Wright Bros.


I'm currently in the midst of reading the wonderful book "Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies" by Lawrence Goldstone (wonderful book, highly recommended!) and am a general aviation geek who remembers seeing this movie, possibly on TV, when I was very young. I watched it again this past Saturday night on Netflix just to see the replica planes, the aerial photography, Gert Frobe and Benny Hill (I'm also an enormous fan of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and had my fingers crossed for a mildly amusing story and hopefully have a few laughs. The movie didn't disappoint those expectations, although I think it would have been better without so much time spent on Patricia Rawnsley and maybe a lot more screen time on Brigitte/Ingrid/ Marlene/Françoise/Yvette/Betty...but I digress...

What struck me, getting back to my original point, was that in the Red Skelton into they make no mention of the Wright Bros! I found this quite interesting. Granted, due to patent litigation between Wright and Curtis, the Wright's obsession with secrecy and other factors, by 1910 most of the breakthroughs in aviation were happening in Europe and not America, but to not even mention the Wrights in the opening sequence, and instead wrongly suggest that the first powered flight took place in France in a Phillips-Multiplane! I nearly spat up my tea!

I didn't know what to make of this. Were the film makers anti-American? Clearly not, as the hero of the story is Stuart Whitman's cowboy character. Were they looking to snub the Wrights? I'm not convinced of this, as they named the cowboy character "Orvil" Newton - clearly a tribute to Orville Wright. Were they dismissive of American pioneer era aviation? Again, doubtful, as they put the Cowboy Newton in a "Curtis" pusher plane (o.k., they used a Bristol Boxkite as a stand-in, but you'd have to be a pretty big aviation geek to tell a Curtis Pusher from a Bristol, and anyway they referred to it as a "Curtis" in the movie).

So my conclusion is that the movie is a deliberate, although heavily masked, snub at Wilber Wright. It was after all Wilber who was the chief decision maker at the company, started all those patent suits and ran himself into an early grave.

Anyone agree? Has this been discussed before?

I leave you with this sad quote: "When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose." - Wilber Wright (shortly before his death)

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