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Quintessential William Wellman from the very beginning, laconicism and gags: Fallen commercial airplane, newspaper headline at the hospital, "never get chummy with a cloudburst." Grounded after the crackup, the pilot (Richard Barthelmess) takes up with the air circus parachutist (Sally Eilers) first seen tangled vexedly in a tree. A simple arrangement of shared flights and adjoining hotel rooms, her marital hopes never cross his mind. "Just because you're hungry, you don't have to buy a restaurant." Bad timing, he has the engagement ring when he finds her in bed with his brother (Tom Brown), just married. "She knocked me for a tailspin, a loop and a barrel roll all in one." Plenty of material for other directors' films (The Tarnished Angels, The Great Waldo Pepper), as well as Wellman's own (Island in the Sky, The High and the Mighty). The brother is a flyboy himself, his pirouettes are seen from the caboose of a moving train in a dandy stunt. "Say, this hornet could pull a Brahman out of the Grand Canyon!" The teasing anticipation of a dangling parachute, the first kiss in an upside-down cockpit, the split-screen effect of estranged lovers on opposite sides of a wall. The hero attempts to bury his heartbreak in international upheavals, he returns with an eyepatch under the goggles and a plane marked with revolutionary slogans, Chinese symbols and the hammer and sickle. "Wherever I go, I leave 'em something to remember me by." The romantic reunion takes place at a ballroom in Havana, the fraternal bond is restored at sea on a sinking carcass. Hawks takes note for Only Angels Have Wings, Barthelmess and all. With Grant Mitchell, James Murray, Claire McDowell, Willard Robertson, and Louise Beavers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |