NFR Project: 'With Car and Camera Around the World' (1929)

With Car and Camera Around the World

Dir: Aloha Wanderwell

Scr: Aloha Wanderwell, Walter Wanderwell

Pho: Aloha Wanderwell, Walter Wanderwell

Ed: Aloha Wanderwell

Premiere: 1929

She called herself, poetically, Aloha Wanderwell. She was the first woman to drive around the world.

She was born Idris Welsh, in Manitoba, Canada in 1906. When she was sixteen, she hooked up with the 25-year-old Walter Wanderwell. Wanderwell was a promoter, born Valerian Johannes Pieczynski in Poland, who sought to take a 1917 Ford Model T on a trip around the world, visiting as many countries as possible. He put out an ad for an adventurous woman to come along on the expedition as part of the driving team. Idris applied, and got the job. In December of 1922, she set off around the world, to return triumphantly in January 1923.

Soon she was calling herself Aloha Wanderwell, although Walter was still married. The marital situation worked itself out as the two married on April 7, 1925. The couple would share two children and thousands and thousands of miles in their special automobile. Throughout the years of traveling, the two took silent footage of the many places, famous and otherwise, they reached.

Aloha became the face of the expedition. She gave lectures on her travels, illustrated with her films, for decades. She had much to tell. She served as driver, translator, mechanic, explorer; she was a writer, a flyer. (She was stranded in the Amazon in later years, and documented a lost tribe there.) The two made standalone travelogues of their journeys, screening them to acclaim and attention – of which 1929’s War Car and Camera Around the World is just a part.

Finally, the two settled down in Miami in 1929. They purchased a yacht, and planned to sail to the South Seas, recording their expedition on film. The day before they were to sail, Walter was murdered by an unknown assailant. No one was convicted of the crime.

Aloha continued to travel, to write, to lecture. She became a journalist. In later years, she donated her copious footage to the Academy Film Archive, where it can be accessed by scholars.

She visited 80 countries on six continents. She traveled over half a million miles. Altogether a remarkable tale about a remarkable person.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Applause.