While I thought this movie was pretty obnoxious, there are not really any boring moments in it that made the experience more dull. However, like many have said already, Bert Lahr is pretty irritating. Later finding huge amounts of fame as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, Lahr plays a guy named Rusty in Flying High. He's an aspiring aviator and wannabe pilot who has assemlbed an "aerocopter", an aircraft with a bulky looking fuselage, stubby helicopter rotors, and a traditional propeller engine on the back. In the film, a girl named Pansy (Charlotte Greenwood) is duped into marrying Rusty because her Dowry is needed to pay for his new invention. Shortly after, Mr. Smith, a man who liked Rusty's helicopter concept but had no money to invest in it, is arrested. It's now up to Rusty to enter his flying machine in a competition and win enough money to bail him out of prison. A doctor examines him to make sure he's pilot material, and then, it's time for the main event. At the air show, biplanes are seen taking off, landing, and taxiing up and down runways. Rusty and his reluctant wife climb into the aerocopter and clumsily take off by smashing through the ceiling of a hangar. The aerocopter basically spits in the face of gravity and continues to climb until it hits an astonishing (even by today's standards) 53,000 feet, after which Pansy jumps out with a parachute and Rusty descends back to earth to crash land. Somehow, falling from this immense height doesn't kill him or disintegrate the helicopter on impact. He wins the prize money, everyone's happy, and that's the end. There's really isn't that much to say about this movie, which is probably a good thing. As I said before, Bert is quite annoying, and overacts way too much. This is one of those films where I actually prefer a side character (Charlotte Greenwood) to the main one. Because it's pre-code, there are some things in Flying High that seem pretty explicit for something made so long ago. A good example of this is a scene where a doctor in the airfield inspects a row of barely-dressed female dancers and says he could do this all day. Probably my favorite part is when Rusty is sent for a physical in order to make sure he can be a competent enough pilot, and the doctor is as annoyed with him as the average audience member probably was. He puts him in a device shaped like a big cylinder and flips a switch which makes it spin rapidly, the machine obviously being meant to simulate the forces of gravity while in an aircraft. By the time it's over, Rusty can barely walk and the sadistic doctor is clearly enjoying himself. Overall, this movie isn't that special and it was also quite loud and obnoxious, but I felt the need to watch it because there are a very limited number of pre-code films in general.
Review of Flying High
