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Between The Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings, the perfect midpoint of distillation for Howard Hawks' breezy-existential pilots. Days and nights at the Newark airport, a bare set vibrating with lovely effects like the way Pat O'Brien's voice slides mid-sentence from bark to murmur as he notices his wife (Martha Tibbetts) in the control room. "The best cockeyed flier in this airline" (James Cagney) enters in an upside-down cockpit and promptly sets his sights on the eager novice (June Travis), the rake's progress unfolds amid clouds and frost. "What do you do when you're flying blind and your radio doesn't work?" "Just sit there and sweat." Sparse locations (station, landing strip, cantina, hospital corridor) add to the marvels of compression, tight spaces colored by rivalries and flirtations, jittery youngsters and shattered veterans, sharp women with masculine names and running gags about bald guys. One man's sneaky date is another's deadly mission and so it goes with the henpecked musketeer (Stuart Erwin) trapped in "fog so thick you can cut it into chunks," the crisscross of orders and radio transmission is suddenly hushed when his widow-to-be (Isabel Jewell) arrives. Birds wait for the mist to dissipate but the characters won't stay grounded—the need to dare one's self is always there, the exhilaration of an aerial loop and the terror of a blazing crash. Not Kipling's "A Code of Morals" but "a question of friendship," before Bringing Up Baby there's "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" on the airwaves. The world has its heavenly (the freedom and weightlessness of the heights) and infernal (flames licking the outside of the airport window) sides, in the middle people meet and break up and reconnected: The real adventure, according to Hawks, and where heroism comes into play. With Barton MacLane, Henry Wadsworth, Craig Reynolds, Dick Purcell, Carlyle Moore, Jr., and Addison Richards. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |