ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Robert J. Maxwell I kind of enjoyed this, despite the stagy performances at the beginning, the ligneous leading man, and the period visual effects. It was written by Spig Wead, the protagonist of John Ford's "The Wings of Eagles", and directed by Frank Capra before he became warm and populist. Fay Wray is a cute and unwittingly sexy as she was in the same year's "King Kong," even if she does keep her dress on this time around.Ralph Graves is a hot-shot aviator in the 1932 US Navy. You ought to see him do outside loops and laughing at orders not to do it. Jack Holt is his superior officer who is committed to the giant dirigibles that fly out of the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Graves is married to Fay Wray, whom Holt loves from afar, in a gentlemanly kind of way. Graves doesn't take Wray seriously when she complains that he's more interested in headlines and aviation trophies than he is in her. He placates her with lines like, "Say, honey, you must know nothing means more to me than you." He thinks he's smart but he's pretty dumb.Graves is chosen to pilot a flight over the South Pole and dropping a flag on it. He decides to land the airplane and plant the flag in person, the happy-go-lucky lug. Well -- maybe not so lucky. He cracks the plane up. Two of the four-man crew wind up dead. And Graves carries the third guy until he collapses from exhaustion, hunger, and cold, abjectly accepting death. But before they can snuff it, the two men are rescued by a dirigible flown by Holt.The first part is a little goofy. The actors speak as if they're on a stage and have to shout to reach the balconies. But the last two thirds of the film are packed with action scenes, and fairly convincing, considering the year. The suffering undergone by the crash survivors isn't stiff-upper-lip stuff either. Roscoe Karns is a wisecracking radioman on the crew. Usually these characters survive and sometimes they're given the final witticism as the film closes on the lovers kissing. But when his foot is injured and he's being hauled along on a sled, he breaks down and shouts with pain, squealing, "I don't want to cry! I don't want to cry!" It's a little horrifying. It's done with such artlessness that it's believable, and the cure turns out to be worse than the disease.It's a commercial enterprise, not a masterpiece. Capra uses some stunning shots from high up in the rafters of the dirigible hangars but aside from that it's a straightforward and somewhat familiar adventure story. It will likely sweep you along by sheer momentum after you're through the initial exposition. Interesting to note that even in 1932 radio operators used speed keys.

bkoganbing Dirigible was the last film that Frank Capra made with Jack Holt and Ralph Graves about the armed services. In this last one the two of them are more like James Cagney and Pat O'Brien than ever. Dirigible also resembles as the other two Graves/Holt films a film that John Ford was more likely to direct.Again the two men clash over a woman, this time Fay Wray who is married to Graves, but who is being driven nuts by Graves's irresponsibility as a flier. Give me one of those lighter than air guys instead and good friend Holt fills the bill.The film echoes the headlines of the time with the country watching the exploits of Admiral Richard E. Byrd and his polar expeditions. Both Holt and Graves go to the South Pole and each has to rescue the other at times. There is a very poignant performance by Roscoe Karns who usually played fast talking annoying characters who were entertaining, but hardly endearing. Karns plays a frostbitten marine who is truly suffering and you really feel for what he's going through.The film was shot according to the Citadel Film series book on the Films of Frank Capra at a dirigible training facility that was eventually closed down and the land was taken by the newly built Santa Anita racetrack later in the decade. The flight sequences were done in the air, just like Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels was.It's a good action film, I wonder though if John Ford could have gotten more out of it, Dirigible is definitely more his kind of film.

CitizenCaine In addition to the films Submarine and Flight, Frank Capra directed a third film with both Jack Holt and Ralph Graves: Dirigible. Originally set to be a follow-up to Wings at Paramount, it was eventually sold to poverty row Columbia. It's a heroic adventure story about competing naval officers who attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. Holt attempts to do it via dirigible and Graves tries the conventional way by ship and sea plane. In between them there's a girl of course: Fay Wray. In their films together, Holt is always the more experienced individual offering some gentlemanly levity to a given situation; where as, Graves is often the young hothead recruit or inexperienced pilot who needs his wings clipped.In Dirigible, Capra features the airship throughout the film, and it's probably one of the few films to do so. Lots of aerial footage of Holt commanding the dirigible and Graves as a pilot move the creaky plot forward. The film was actually based on a real life incident and adapted by Jo Swerling and Dorothy Howell based on Frank Wead's story. As in many films from this period, an obligatory romantic subplot is tacked on, which kind of detracts from the film. Fay Wray is Helen Pierce, Graves' wife. The script fails Wray as she acts discombobulated throughout the film. She lives Graves, but can't stand the danger he readily embraces. Meanwhile, good guy Holt, who plays second fiddle, offers a shoulder to cry on and rescues the big lug Graves on top of it, but he doesn't get the girl. OK as entertainment, but a notch below most of Capra's efforts. **1/2 of 4 stars.

Fisher L. Forrest I have about 3 feet of shelf space in my library devoted to books about airships, and I don't think any of them use the term "dirigible", except derisively, in referring to lighter-than-air flying machines. "Dirigible" comes from the French "dirigible ballon", meaning "steerable balloon". For English speakers, the proper term, and the one used by the U.S.Navy, is "airship", but apparently the director and writers for DIRIGIBLE didn't know that. "Airship" is not used once throughout this interesting, if seriously flawed, film. There's a lot about airships the director and writers didn't know. For example, in one part of the story, USS Los Angeles, in her proper persona, is shown flying over the South Pole to rescue some downed aviators from a Ford Trimotor crash. Since the pole lies in excess of 10,000 feet above sea- level, and since none of the Navy's four rigid airships were designed to fly higher than 3,000 feet high, such a project would have been totally impossible. The Germans in WWI had some ships designed for as high as 20,000 feet, but our Navy never did.Well, despite all the wrong-headedness of the story, USS Los Angeles manages to be the star of this movie and upstages all of the human cast. In the course of the film, USS Los Angeles plays a dual role. First as the fictional USS Pensacola, which was destroyed in a hurricane while flying on a hare-brained project to the South Pole. This was no doubt inspired by the real fate of USS Shenandoah, which was destroyed over the U.S. middle-west while on an equally hare-brained project. Later in the story, as herself, USS Los Angeles is sent to the South Pole on the already mentioned impossible rescue mission. Some of the events involving the downed aviators seems to have been suggested by the real troubles of the ill- fated Scott expedition to the South Pole of 1912. There, one of the explorers who was being almost literally carried by the others, went out of the tent and died to spare his comrades. Incidentally, Ford Trimotors were used by the early U.S. polar expeditions, but there were no crashes involving them. There was one air crash, but it occurred near the shore, and was not a Ford Trimotor.There were a number of great scenes, possible and impossible, in the film, but inevitably we come back to poor Fay Wray in the thankless role of the wife who can't abide her husband's adventurous career as a Navy pilot. While her romantic entanglements are boring us silly, we are also given the impression that the U.S.Navy had a whole fleet of rigid airships. In a scene near the beginning we see what looks like a number of airships flying in formation. If this didn't involve camera trickery, those other airships were blimps, not the big rigids. In a brief scene, it might be hard to tell the difference. At no time during the roughly ten year period beginning about 1924 did the U.S.Navy have more than one rigid airship in commission. The Congress kept such tight purse strings on the Navy that they could only afford enough helium to keep but one flying!