Friday Minute
No. 131 | July 2, 2010

Hollywood High-flier

Our theme this week
Howard Hughes and the movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Howard Hughes, Moviemaker
Tuesday         —   Melvin and Howard (1980)
Wednesday    —   The Rocketeer (1991)
Thursday        —   The Hoax (2007)

The Aviator (2004)

Rumors of a Howard Hughes biopic go back at least to the 1970s, many of them with Warren Beatty’s name attached.  It was the actor’s dream project to direct and star in a film about the famed aviator and moviemaker.   Beatty’s plans never did get off the ground, but according to Star, Peter Biskind’s biography of the actor published this year, Beatty, now 73, still hopes to make a film about the reclusive billionaire’s later years.

An earlier life of Hughes was a television movie made in 1977, one year after his death.  The Amazing Howard Hughes was based on the biography by Noah Dietrich, Hughes’s business partner for three decades.  Though the movie received mixed reviews, the lead performance by future star Tommy Lee Jones won raves.  The film is available on DVD.

Finally, in 2004, The Aviator made it to the big screen, with Martin Scorsese directing.  Most reviews were positive and the film earned eleven Academy Award nominations.  It appeared that Scorsese might win his long-overdue Oscar, but he had to wait again.  The Aviator won five awards, and two years later Scorsese at last won his, for The Departed.

The Aviator spans a couple of decades of Hughes’s life, focusing on the years that he was a public figure, while he was making films and flying planes, and running a studio and airline.  Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look anything like Hughes, but it hardly matters.  His matinée idol looks capture the appeal of Hughes in his playboy years, which provide a contrast for later scenes when Hughes’s compulsive behavior grows ever more erratic.  DiCaprio gives a brave performance as a man who has everything but control of his own demons.  Hughes’s obsessions were legendary.  Eventually they get the best of him, and he falls victim to mental illness.

Cate Blanchett gives an Oscar-winning (and deserving) performance as Katharine Hepburn, one of the many women that Hughes pursues.  Hepburn is the friend that Hughes desperately needs, and her banter and care are a good check on his worst impulses.  But Hughes is destined to find other women, and they include Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and fifteen-year-old Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner).  Danger ahead.

The film covers a lot of ground, taking 170 minutes, though with little waste.  There are scenes on movies sets, in the air above Beverly Hills (ending in a near-fatal plane crash), and at U.S. Senate hearings.  You get a fine sense of the man that Hughes was, what his life was like, and what all the fuss was about.  You see what he had, and what he lost. 

Hughes lived a couple of decades after the film leaves off.  Perhaps then he may have been a freer man.  If Warren Beatty ever gets around to it (though he’d better start soon), we may yet see that part of the story.

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The Aviator (2004)
Martin Scorsese, director
Trailer

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The Aviator (2004)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett

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Quote of Note
Jack Frye:  So you want me to bribe senators?
Howard Hughes:  I don’t want them bribed, Jack.  I want it done legally.  I want them bought.
—Jack Frye (Danny Huston), Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), The Aviator (2004)

…58…59…60.