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Airfield to oblivion, medal of trauma. Yanks in the Royal Flying Corps, a rude awakening for the upper-crust lieutenant (Fredric March). "I thought there would be some sport to it... I didn't expect to be a chauffeur to a graveyard." The pilot's observers drop like flies, the one who sticks around is the brawling gunner (Cary Grant) who thinks nothing of mowing down an unarmed Teutonic parachutist. "This is war. I'm hired to kill the enemy, and there ain't no book of rules about that." Hollowed out by his victories, the ace is asked to make a speech justifying the conflict to a batch of newcomers and can barely get the words out before a bombardment curtails the reception. ("Didn't get a chance to do anything, did I," sighs a callow recruit from beneath the rubble.) A Lost Generation jeremiad closer to "associate director" Mitchell Leisen than to Stuart Walker, and closer to Death Takes a Holiday than to his other aviation titles (13 Hours by Air, I Wanted Wings). Horror of "the shining example," cursed to recount his moral degradation as bravery and to recite the names of the fallen in wide-eyed nightmares. "Every time I knock some poor devil down, burning, they buy me drinks." The Reaper emblem on the blood-speckled fuselage, the skull under March's skin in despondent close-up, the blonde socialite (Carole Lombard) swathed in furs and tender-morbid fascination. The door ajar to the suicide amid singalongs is remembered by Bergman at the onset of The Serpent's Egg, the bitter upshot is a corpse in the cockpit for the fabrication of heroism. Corman in Von Richthofen and Brown completes the entombment. With Jack Oakie, Sir Guy Standing, Forrester Harvey, Kenneth Howell, Leyland Hodgson, Virginia Hammond, and Adrienne D'Ambricourt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |