Capra made no mistake about attempting to match the success of his first talking action-picture Flight ('29), casting the same two leads Ralph Graves and Jack Holt to play pilots competing for the affections of a beautiful lady, this time played by Fay Wray just two years before her legendary turn in King Kong ('33).

Complicating matters is the wife of Ralph Graves' Friskie Pierce, Helen (Wray), who refuses so sit idle while her husband flies half-way around the world and then naively attempts to rebound with his best friend, Jack Bradon (Holt), when he's away. Instead of dumping one pilot for another (isn't this a lateral move?) she should be seeking a man with more inactive career choice more befitting for her cloying personality - perhaps a painter or a writer.
Although it shamelessly capitalizes on film's of its kind that came before it, Capra proves once again that he's a great entertainer and magician of aerial photography. Avoiding the technical pitfalls of Flight (a dirigible crash over the Atlantic and a rough Antarctic landing show leaps in technological progress) and taking advantage of a supportive and accommodating U.S. Navy who allowed Columbia Pictures to shoot famous air-suspended dirigibles like the USS Los Angeles, the film feels polished, if nothing else.
The problem lies in the film's rote and reductive screenplay (co-written by Capra regular Jo Swerling), which stresses predictable plot points and exploits the type-casted personas of its actors. Nevertheless, the film was a huge success for Columbia and was the first film from the studio to premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, a fateful night on April 3rd, 1931.
It's too flimsy and familiar, and although technically evolved from Frank Capra's previous aviation epic Flight, Dirigible seems auspiciously grand, yet dramtically stale. It's a big, giant zeppelin of a film - a wonder of the skies, yet hollow, empty and inevitably, obsolete.
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