Word: wildering
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...managing editor, Ardis ("Mike") Kennedy, Reporter Norma Lee Browning took a muscular male staffer as escort and started out by scouting the scores of hillbilly hangouts scattered from West Madison Street, Chicago's Skid Row, to "Glitter Gulch" on the squalid South Side. There, in dives that were "wilder than any television western," Reporter Browning set out to stalk and observe a species "whose customs and culture-patterns are as incomprehensible to us as dial telephones are to them." The men mostly sport Levis, black leather jackets and "Presley sideburns"; the women go in for sleazy skirts or slacks...
...Spirit of St. Louis. New York to Paris with Charles A. Lindbergh: Director Billy Wilder and Actor James Stewart make a good film about a great adventure (TIME, March...
...take-off for Paris, as Director Billy Wilder has filmed and cut it, is a striking piece of cinematic craftsmanship. One by one, like bricks in a rising wall the difficulties are stacked in front of the hero (James Stewart) and in the moviegoer's mind: bad weather, the sod runway almost ankle-deep in mud and spotted with potholes, high wires and high trees near the field's edge, engine running 30 revs too low, gas load at least a hundred gallons more than the plane has ever taken off with, pilot already worn from lack...
Once the spectator has caught the tail of Lindbergh's kite, he will hardly dare to let go-Director Wilder sees to that. He worries the last quiver of excitement from the facts-from the time Lindbergh fell asleep in mid-Atlantic, from the fishing boat he hailed ("Which way is Ireland?"), from the landfall at Ireland's Dingle Bay, less than three miles off course after 3,000 miles of flight by dead reckoning. And always there is the thrilling sight of the little plane as it flashes through the air as clean as a sword...
When the plain facts are not sufficient for the purposes of mass entertainment, Wilder is not averse to dressing them up in high commercial style. He supplies plenty of hee-haw at the suspender-salesman and apoplectic-captain level, a musky little whiff of romance on the eve of the flight, a couple of near crashes that never really were, and a streak of sentimental, pseudo-religious superstition, involving a St. Christopher medal...