Howard Hawks directed 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. How I was looking for forward to seeing what the man who would go on to helm The Thing from Another World might do with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Sig Ruman and Thomas Mitchell. To my surprise, the answer was simultaneously “too much” and “not enough”.
Hawks definitely made movies that were full of manly men doing manly things. If there is a woman, she was rarely much of a love interest and, instead, usually just “one of the guys”. This time, I was intrigued to see two women, though neither one of them fare too well in the South American town where Grant runs a fledging mail delivery service.
This town is Barranca, which I confused for the real town of Barrancas in Colombia. The fictional port village here is somehow within spitting distance of both the ocean and the sheer peaks of the Andes, which might have been quite a sight if the location was real and not a set. That said, it isn’t a bad set, and it is wisely largely shot in dimly lit night scenes and with mist softening the edges. A lesson aspiring filmmakers should take from such productions is how fog or mist and make your set feel more expansive.
Entertainer Arthur is on route to a gig elsewhere she wonders ashore for a meal. Two of Grant’s pilots (Allyn Joslyn and Noah Beery Jr.) make a wager on which of them gets to take her to dinner. Beery wins the bet, but Grant tells them both he will be taking her to dinner. The winner of the bet turns out to be quite the loser, forced by his boss to do a mail run which will be a fatal flight. Maybe the pilot should have stayed faithful to local Milisa Sierra instead of pursuing Arthur, as he might have lived longer.
Arthur is furious at the reaction of the men to the death of Beery which is none whatsoever. Grant can’t understand what her problem is. “You’re a queer duck […] I can’t make you out.” With all the male bonding here, the word “queer” did come to mind. But Arthur correctly suspects he was scorned by a woman.
And that woman is Rita Hayworth and, of course, she will soon make an appearance. She has married Richard Barthelmess, a disgraced figure in pilot circles, where is known for having bailed on a crashing plane, leaving his mechanic to go down with it.
The mechanic was the younger brother of Mitchell, who is Grant’s current mechanic. So, there’s all manner of tensions between the various parties, with nobody questioning just how the hell this disparate group of people with a shared history could all be at the same place at the same time.
Barthelmess will be Grant’s newest pilot. He has arrived at a critical time, as Grant needs to keep flights going for just one more week to qualify for a lucrative contract for the business. Seems to me that if the continuance of the operation is this close to failure, then it might just be as ready to throw in the towel now. I think that is twice as true when considering the rate at which they are burning through pilots and aircraft.
And so, Barthelmess finds himself doing such flights as transporting a case of nitroglycerin, bringing to my mind Wages of Fear. I was surprised he is instructed to drop the stuff out of a trapdoor in the plane if a situation becomes too precarious. Given the apparent expendability of both planes and operators, I was baffled by that decision. Of course, this is what he ends up having to do. Don ‘Red’ Barry advises Barthelmess to drop the lot on a nest of Andean condors, which seemed to be especially cruel. Still, it establishes the birds as an element of this world, though it is still a shock when they become an unexpected element of the final act.
The flight footage is a mix of decent model work, full-size planes on wires on a studio set, and some real-world footage. The last of these is where the film really shines, with a particularly astonishing shot closely following a plane as it hugs closely to a sheer cliff face as it rounds a plateau. I found myself lost in the action at times, even when I knew most of what I was seeing was effects. One nail-biting moment finds Barthelmess without sufficient ground for takeoff, so he runs the plane straight off the top of that plateau, relying on updraft from the ground below to give him adequate lift. Some other elements add verisimilitude to better sell the action, such as one flight requiring supplemental oxygen for the pilots.
Alas, the planes must always return to ground and the plot with them. At times, it feels like the film doesn’t know what to do when it isn’t in the air. It even seems to lose track of Arthur, often now knowing what to do with her for long stretches. Frankly, I wasn’t that surprised she is sidelined for long periods as she is miscast.
For that matter, so is Grant. I suspect he was a tougher guy in real life than most of the characters he played on the screen. Still, I was never fully convinced by his portrayal of a grizzled pilot in this movie.
I wanted to like Only Angels Have Wings more than I did, though it also will likely be better enjoyed by many other viewers. Supplemental features on the Criterion blu-ray have some talking heads saying how bold it was for Hawks to mix together so many different genres, though I felt it never really gelled. The disparate parts also result in such unfortunate moments as a deeply stupid twist which initiates the climactic sequence, and which had somebody behaving in a manner contrary to everything we knew so far about their character. Like several of Grant’s aircraft, some of what transpires lands successfully, while other elements crash and burn.
Dir: Howard Hawks
Starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Richard Barthelmess
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray