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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative
92.4  
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March, 2006
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Book Review



Flying Down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers. By Rosalie Schwartz. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. x, 386 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-58544-382-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-58544-421-9.)

Rosalie Schwartz's Flying Down to Rio promises a new way of looking at a popular Hollywood movie and connecting it to issues in American culture. The 1933 film that lends its name to the title of Schwartz's book, with its surrealistic images of airborne chorus lines dancing over Rio de Janeiro, seems like a Freudian dream interpretation of the public's often inane fascination with flying in the interwar period. 1
      Although the book is well written and well intentioned, the title is misleading. Flying Down to Rio is a traditional narrative history of aviation, the movies, tourism, and the connection between Pan American Airways (Pan Am) and RKO—Radio Pictures. As aviation history, the book is competent, but Schwartz makes some common errors (T. Claude Ryan did not design Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis; Donald Hall and Lindbergh did [p. 209]). As film history, the book is disappointing. The author might have attempted to provide more than a glimpse of Hollywood's longtime fascination with aviation. . . .

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