See also: Transatlantic crossing.
| Across the Atlantic | |
| Director: | Howard Bretherton |
| Story: | John Ransom |
| Starring: | Monte Blue |
| Cinematography: | Barney McGill |
| Studio: | Warner Bros. |
| Distributor: | Warner Bros. |
| Runtime: | 60 minutes; 7 reels |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | Sound (Synchronized) (English Intertitles) |
Across the Atlantic is a 1928 lost[1] American synchronized sound romantic drama produced and distributed by Warner Bros. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using the sound-on-disc Vitaphone process. Influenced by the "Lindy craze", generated by Charles Lindbergh's famous ocean crossing flight, Across the Atlantic was rushed into production.
Two brothers, Hugh (Monte Blue) and Dan Clayton (Robert Ober), love their father's secretary, Phyllis Jones (Edna Murphy). She chooses Hugh, and they marry before he goes to war as a pilot. Shot down in France, he loses his memory and becomes a drifter. Eight years later, Phyllis, resigned to her fate, promises to marry Dan after a visit to the place in France where Hugh was last seen.
Meanwhile, Hugh, back in America, is working for his father (Burr McIntosh) at the Clayton aircraft company. While he is test-flying an aircraft, his memory returns. He crashes and is taken to an asylum because of his insistence that he is John Clayton's son.
Hugh escapes the asylum, steals an experimental trans-Atlantic aircraft, and flies it to Paris to be reunited with his family.
Aviation historian Michael Paris in From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism, and Popular Cinema (1995) described the frenzy of trying to woo Lindbergh to do a film. Hollywood resorted to a spate of aviation-related features including Publicity Madness (1927), Flying Romeos (1928) and A Hero for a Night, even the Walt Disney Studios' Plane Crazy (1928), all comedy spoofs of the Lindbergh transatlantic flight.[2]
Across the Atlantic was a silent film but Warner Bros. added the Vitaphone process with musical score and sound effects, but no dialogue.[3]
H. Hugh Wynne in The Motion Picture Stunt Pilots and Hollywood's Classic Aviation Movies (1987) wrote "Lindbergh's flight influenced the story of 'Across the Atlantic'."[4]