Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes

Rating:
Summary: Movies & Aviation were His Obsessions.
Review: This was a decadent age (1927) and, thank Goodness, he wasn't another Bugsy Berkley with his sexual orgies and apparitions. Howard had a love affair with the airplane, not women. He made a few movies using a sky-full of vintage airplanes called 'Hell's Angels,' then a controversial western, 'Outlaw,' in which a beautiful sunset was seen along with an overexposed Jane Russell. It was denied the seal of approval by a ten-man censorship board. He made a grand presentation of other stars' cleavage in earlier films, but was denied motion piction approval. It was released anyway.

As a Texas industrialist, he turned out to be an innovator by removing the top wing so planes could bly above the weather. He bought TWA airlines from Jack. He declared himself just an aviator, but he was a man before his time with his sheer determination to conquer the skies. Had he been in his prime during the Space Age, he should have had a chance at piloting the Space Shuttle.

On 9-13-35 on an aviation trial, he had to crash land in a beet field. He demonstrated his own planes and lived through a horrendous crash which looked like a battlefield on fire in Beverly Hills, when he was burned over 78% and ended up crippled, walking with a cane. I can't imagine Howard Hughes having such a high, boyish sound. His voice never did age. The characters stayed the same in this movie, never aging. Only the last shot of Hughes showed the strain and mental illness he couldn't shake.

In 1913, when he was a boy there was a typhus and chorlera epidemic in Houston. He kept having flashbacks of the mother telling he he would never be safe as she bathed him in a tub and spelled out QUARANTINE. As a result, he had a fetish about germs throughout his life and scrubbed his hands so hard they bled. Even in 1935, after his success in the movie industry and head of the Hughes Aircraft Company, he felt like he was losing control, and used mantras to keep sane. He had at least two mental breakdowns in this movie.

He was a true pioneeer in aviation, constantly on the newsreels. He had a fascination with planes, even those which could float on water. Leo DiCaprio performed this icon as a human, though flawed. After he changed TWA to TransWorld Airlines, he ran into conflict with PanAm president Juan played by one of my favorites, Alex Baldwin. He told him in the Coconut Grove, where a lot of the personal interaction took place, that no airline should have a monopoly on international travel.

There were scandals with the women, though he appeared to enjoy touching planes more than women. He "interviewed" many young starlets under contract to him. He was clear at the end that aviation was the great love of his life. He was dubbed as capricious and eccentric, but mainly he was afraid of people -- paranoid, thinking there were spies in his midst to learn his secrets.

If he loved any woman, it was the mannish Kate Hepburn, played marvelously by Cate Blanchett, who left him for Spencer Tracy, He visited her family in Conn. but felt alienated, and she tried to dominate him. He wanted to control Ava Gardner, played as a beautiful star by Kate Beckinsale, and asked her to marry him. Both women appeared in his delusion to prepare for the Senate hearing -- or was it his imagination.

His first series of movies took years to complete; 'Hell's Angels' was the most expensive movie to that date. He used a lot of old planes in a blue sky and it didn't look right so he hired a meterologist and the crew flew to Oakland for 'clouds.' The red one looked like the triplane Red Baron flew to his death 4-21-18. He'd been the top ace of WWI with 80 victories, 20 kills insured a pilot legendary status. He had 'traumatic brain injury' nine months before he flew into a shooting gallery, violating all kinds of rules of flying -- rules from the manual he himself wrote.

Hughes' movie ended with a glimpse of WWI and even included the Hindenburg. Jean Harlow looked a lot like the cigarette girl in the lavish indoor decor of the Coconut Grove, with bleached hair. The replica of a plane in ice at the reception on Hollywood Blvd. with Al Jolson in a talking film singing 'Blue Skies' was nice.

Sining and dining was not illegal, but free plane trips on PanAm by Senator Brewster were, especially to Peru where his wife bought a painting of a llama. The senator charged Hughes with defrauding the government for accepting millions of dollars for spy planes he never delivered (he designed ASF11 reconnaisance flyers a la Buck Rogers) and for the production of Hercules (56 million), the largest plane ever built. FBI looked through his personal items at the Mayflower Hotel, his residence 2-12-47. Because of his mental illness, he Quarantined himself from the world.

The Hercules became Howard's folly, the sixty-ton white elephant with a wing span the length of a football field. It was meant to fly 200 tons of army equipment. The media was used to make Hughes a failure, and a news reel focused on the move to Los Angeles harbor of the monstrosity, which was a monumental undertaking. The Texaco truck in the background was effective.

Hughes came of hibernation with the old man meterologist and the Spruce Goose with eight engines made its flying debut off the coast of Southern California. With throttle up, they went higher than actuality (I think it barely skimmed over the water), but this was a movie, not life, as he had railed at Hepburn.

The senator accused him of producing a dirty movie and making airplanes which don't fly. At the hearing, it was promoted that the whole world will see what he has become. When he successfully got that plane out of the water, an early console t.v. wet in the PanAm office proved his ability to overocme his tarnished reputation. All his life he'd wanted to fly the fastest planes and be the richest man in the world. This movie was aptly named. For a man who never smoked or drank (only milk), he made his mark for posterity.

All I ever knew about Howard Hughes was his reclusiveness. This movie gives the reason for his fetishes in later life and his obsessions with power. I'd heard about his propensity to have the young starlets at his disposal, and I'd thought he must be quite a virile man. On the contrary, this account shows only three, one a young 15-yr.-old girl with well-developed mammories; where, I ask, was Terry Moore? As I recall, she proved after his demise that she had been married to him. She did not fit in his existence as this film portrayed him.