Never intended for commercial release, The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh is one of filmmaker Orson Welles’ simplest, and briefest, offerings.
Seated behind his typewriter, Welles spoke of the human spirit and quoted from the journal of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The three-minute short, shot by Gary Graver in February 1984, was intended as a message to an ailing friend, Bill Cronshaw. Keith McNulty, who was a crew member on the unfinished Orson Welles’ Magic Show, handled the cue cards.
“We simply shot it in one take, which lasted three minutes. It was Orson reading a page from aviator Charles Lindbergh’s diary,” Graver recalled in his book Making Movies With Orson Welles. “We then transferred this to videotape, and Orson gave it to his good friend and accountant Bill Cronshaw … Orson had never intended for it to be anything other than a sort of get well card for a friend who was ill.”
Cronshaw had a role in Welles’ The Merchant of Venice in 1969 and assisted in The Other Side of the Wind.
After Welles’ death in October 1985, the footage was preserved by the Munich Film Museum, which is the repository of many of his incomplete or rare cinematic works. The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh was restored and shown for the first time in 2000.
The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh has been shown since then at film festivals. It has not been released in its entirety on home video, however, it has turned up numerous times online, including on the YouTube clip below.
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