Fifty years after Gann’s Fate

Who knows what prompts a programming director to air a seldom-seen movie from nearly half a century ago? In this case, it might have been the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ernest K. Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter that so moved Turner Classic Movies to screen the movie inspired by the book. How many times had this movie been screened on television in the last decade or so? Hard to know, but it can’t have been very often. Once upon a time, it must have been a staple of television programmers, at least, enough to make Mr. Gann regretful about disassociating himself from the movie. He was piqued at the final product and didn’t like it, but admitted in later years that he would have liked the royalties from the frequent airings on TV. But at some point, probably the 1980s, the movie receded into the mists of time, called forth less and less each year to take up space in a station schedule.

It was last spring or thereabouts, and I chanced upon the movie just as the opening credits were rolling. At that time, I had never heard of the book or the movie it inspired, and I say “inspired” because the book is an episodic memoir not especially reducible to the formula of a Hollywood screenplay. But there I was, watching some screenwriter’s best effort at transforming Gann’s book into a Hollywood production.

I found the film intriguing for a number of reasons, but it was most certainly not a great film and perhaps not even a good film. I always liked actor Glenn Ford, so seeing him in a dramatic role that wasn’t a western or film noir was enjoyable. In the middle of the movie, there is a weird flashback scene in which Jane Russell appears in a cameo as herself. Well into her 40s and semi-retirement when the movie was made, she still looked absolutely stunning and was totally believable as the World War II pin-up girl version of herself. The movie also featured young Suzanne Pleshette and Nancy Kwan in supporting roles.

Ultimately, the movie typifies some elements of Hollywood moviemaking in the early to mid-1960s. The Production Code was almost history, and films were already subverting it in ways large and small. Such a frank treatment of an airline disaster could be viewed from this forward-leaning perspective that embraced cinematic naturalism; however, the acting itself was fairly traditional and stiff, and it is not uncommon to see movies of the period host a curious collision of old and new in this manner. Such is the art of transitions. It was 1964, but the sixties were not yet The Sixties.

I’ve focused so much attention on a mediocre film from a mediocre era because it did me the service of introducing me to Mr. Gann and his book, if only in sideways fashion. The movie might be nickel-plated, but the book is pure gold, and I encourage one and all to give it a read.

I had never counted myself an aviation enthusiast…and still don’t. Luckily, one needn’t be to appreciate Mr. Gann’s memoir. There is so much clear thinking, wisdom, and humanity on each page – I found it ennobling to read.

Principally, the book serves as a great canvas on which Mr. Gann paints the particulars of his idiosyncratic view of the world. He is forever pondering the ineluctable workings of chance, or as he had it, “fate’s nefarious and beneficial doings.” He relates stories where his survival depended upon seemingly inconsequential occurrences – there was the icing incident where flying a DC-2 (a last-minute replacement for the scheduled DC-3) was the difference between life and death or where the need of a chart from the passenger compartment led to the discovery of a near-fatal oil leak. There are stories of colleagues whose demise, much to the consternation of the author, cannot be squared with the facts (or just as often, the lack of facts). Gann’s long career as a pilot, inevitably perhaps, leads him to consider: Why them and not me?

As to the art and craft of flying an airplane, Mr. Gann’s descriptive flourishes come rather like the sudden banks of air he describes. His prose is flat, laser sharp, and precise in its descriptions until, often, erupting into a pleasant and strange figuration often as jolting as the things he describes. For instance, a sudden and violent mid-air squall is unleashed thusly: “Some preposterous genie turns a fire hose on the windshield.” But just as often, Mr. Gann had a gift for description that didn’t rely on antics, and in any event, both his fidelity and ostentation was a pleasure.

He also had a gift for clear-headedness. For instance, in the chapter titled “Gypsies” (my favorite in the book), Gann describes where he was and what he was doing when he learned that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. He was in San Juan, refueling for the next leg of a trip to Brazil. In the next chapter (“Rule Books Are Paper”), his reflections on Pearl Harbor struck me as incredibly true and honest and rarer still for their lack of sentimentality. He wrote:

“The hysteria of Pearl Harbor had yet to evaporate and the echoing cry of indignation from the American people now sounded like a traumatic screech rather than a determined roar of anger. The true leaders did not yet have their bearings. The still-unyoked multitude milled in Babylonian turmoil as their pundits cast them adrift between selfish opportunism and impossible visions of nobility. The paradox affected every endeavor and it paraded in brash nudity through the erupting complex of aviation.”

So brilliant and rare is this passage, it reverberates even today and in no small manner could be applied to much of what we have just lived through after 9/11.

Clear-headed and unsentimental, yes, but Gann was also capable of tender musings on a number of beloved things. My last example is drawn from “Gypsies.” While surveying the pleasures of his aviator’s charts, Gann spares a few thoughts for art, reflecting:

“Someday we would chart the heavens for actual penetration. The positions of the stars and planets will be plotted within a fractional second of arc. But I pray that the representation of stellar bodies will be more than mere blobs signaling to the leanness of purely scientific minds. There are other hungers. Let there be true artists involved who will color a blue star blue, and one that is amber, amber, and pink, pink – accordingly.”

Indeed.