If you know me even slightly (and nobody really knows anyone more than slightly, do they?) you’re aware that I love old comedy two-reelers, any movie connected to director Leo McCarey and old airplanes. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered this past weekend that TCM was airing a 1927 Charley Chase two-reel silent comedy called (inexplicably) ‘Us’, the plot of which revolves around Charley trying to get up the nerve to take his first airplane ride. McCarey was the ‘supervising director’, a term I still don’t fully grasp since James Parrott–who happened to be Charley Chase’s brother–was the director-director. (Possibly McCarey’s title was the Hal Roach equivalent to that ghastly term we now find in use–‘showrunner’.) In any event, I was a tad disappointed in the film as a comedy–the situational interactions between Charley and the woman who thinks he’s an aviator are strained and take up too much footage. And the air stunts are minimal and unconvincingly achieved. Yet the Ur-Film that we see is quite fascinating on a completely different level. In 1927, aviation was just being brought to the masses. Though flying had been around for roughly thirty years, it was largely considered an eccentric, experimental gambit. The Great War brought it into the public’s consciousness as the field of daredevils and suicide-mission adventurers. But beyond barnstormers who flew around the midwest giving rides to locals who’d never seen a plane up close, the public had little knowledge of what it was like to be in a machine up in the air. Passenger transport was on the verge of being introduced and the increasing fascination with aviation was on its way up in 1927 and would peak the following year. Thus what we’re seeing in ‘Us’ (what the hell does that title mean anyway?) is a view of the world when people still routinely refused to trust the machine that, one hundred years later, we not only trust implicitly but more often than not dislike the experience of using. There’s a moment early in the film when a woman gets off the bi-plane that’s giving rides for a couple of bucks and says “It’s lovely up there! I’m goin up again to hang by my toes!” And we see in her enthusiasm the future of the culture of flying; people got used to it, people enjoyed it, people trusted it and–long before security lines and so many other bothersome things took the fun out of flying–people loved it. Nowadays, to be somebody who loves the culture of flying pins you as an ‘AvGeek’. Then, it pinned you as a thoroughly modern sort. Like I said, as a comedy “Us” is only middling. But as a time-travel machine back to a very different moment in flight’s relatively recent history, it’s invaluable and fascinating. At least to an AvGeek such as myself…