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| André Gille and Pascal Lamorisse in Stowaway in the Sky |
After the success of his short film The Red Balloon (1956), Albert Lamorisse conceived another aerial adventure on a larger scale. It became his first feature, Stowaway in the Sky, and also starred his son, Pascal. It's a fanciful tale of an inventor (André Gille) who develops what he thinks is a revolutionary ballooning technique. On the maiden flight, his young grandson (Pascal) manages to scramble aboard after clinging to the gondola at liftoff. The inventor reluctantly allows the boy to accompany him on the flight, and they set off on a series of adventures that take them over spectacular French landscapes from Brittany to the Camargue and into close encounters with the Strasbourg Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and Mont Blanc. They're tracked on the ground by an assistant (Maurice Baquet), who gets into comic scrapes of his own. To get the effects he needed for the film, Lamorisse helped develop a shock-absorbing mechanism called Helivision, which eliminated the vibrations of a camera mounted on a helicopter. All of the aerial sequences were shot this way, including those that appear to be taking place inside the gondola of the balloon: A half-basket was attached to the side of the helicopter and the actors rode in it while filming took place. Although there is some dialogue in setting up the premise and advancing what plot there is, it's essentially a silent film. Jack Lemmon, who liked the film so much that he bought the rights to it, added his own voiceover narration scripted by S.N. Behrman for the American release. I haven't seen it, but some who have think it detracts from the charm of the film, which is often breathtakingly beautiful.
