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I just finished watching The Last Flight (1931). It's a pre-Code movie, directed by William Dieterle from a script by John Monk Saunders, whose novel Single Lady provided the source material; I rented it from the library mostly because it starred Richard Barthelmess. From e-mail to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving: "Oh, man. I have to get this down for Patreon. That is possibly the single weirdest film I've seen about World War I."
Remember when I said that if the protagonists of The Dawn Patrol (1938) survived, they'd fit right in with Hemingway's lost generation? Meet the cast of The Last Flight, American ex-servicemen drinking away their days in Paris in 1919. All of them were flyers in the war, all of them invalided out with visible and invisible injuries; their doctors have written them off as "spent bullets . . . like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement . . . useless." They never talk about going home. Shep Lambert (David Manners1) has an elegant clownish face and wears dark glasses to hide the nervous twitch in one eye; it goes away if he's drunk enough, so he makes sure he always is. Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) burned his hands to the bone bringing them both down safely in a flaming plane; less outgoing than his friend, he carries himself with a wary defensiveness, preemptively cold-shouldering pity, mockery, gratitude. Their old comrades are boisterous, folksy Bill (Johnny Mack Brown) and sleepy-eyed Francis (Elliott Nugent), the sharpshooter of the squadron formerly known as "Sudden Death." When they discover a slender, spacey girl (Helen Chandler) standing at the bar of Claridge's with a stranger's false teeth clasped gravely in a champagne glass between her hands, they recognize her as one of their disconnected own: "Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne. Boys, she's going to be a lot of trouble!" Last and least welcome, Frink (Walter Byron) is the sixth wheel of the group, a pushy journalist with a creeper's manners and a moustache like the villain in a melodrama—but so long as he behaves himself, nobody cares enough about him to throw him out. And then, once the script has assembled all of these intriguing characters in the same city, almost nothing happens.
The film is nearly plotless. There's a flurry of activity near the end as several characters self-destruct in linked succession, but few of these interactions feel inevitably driven so much as plausibly stupid. The opening and closing scenes suffer from the need to say something important about the war experience and mostly just come off as sententious. In between, however, The Last Flight reproduces with startling fidelity the experience of spending a lost weekend with five very interesting, very damaged, very drunk people who have no intention of sobering up any time soon. They talk in banter, in-jokes and non sequiturs, ticcing a funny line around the conversation like the hiccups. Absurdism is a competitive sport. No one has any attention span. Someone hears about a fight and everyone rushes out into the hall to see it; someone wants to get away to Lisbon and everyone else piles into the train; a hotel elevator turns into a flight simulator with two different pilots at the controls. The script is pre-Code, so there's a running joke of increasingly outlandish euphemisms for excusing oneself for the bathroom: "He went off to sharpen his skates . . . shave a horse . . . tame an alligator . . . take a Chinese singing lesson."2 Just the quantities of alcohol drunk by all characters at all times would have disqualified it in the days of the Production Code. After the seven-minute mark, I don't think there's anyone onscreen who's sober. Sometimes they're adorable, sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes you just want to stuff them all in a drawer and tell them to shut up. In short, they can be exactly as exhausting and vulnerable as real drunk people, and the film doesn't try to corral them into a three-act drama: they simply appear to exist in a narrative as unstructured and impulsive as their deliberately aimless lives. Even for pre-Code cinema, this is a strikingly modern approach—I expect to find it in the French New Wave, not 1930's Hollywood. The recurring mottos of the story are "Who cares?" and "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
And the damage is real, even more so than I expected from other films of the era.3 Francis sets his pocket watch to wake him at regular intervals because otherwise he drifts away into a permanent narcoleptic daze; he says little because he slurs even when more or less sober. Affable Shep is scarily disoriented, forgetting not just days of the week, but calendar dates and cities—"I kind of lose track of things," he apologizes airily, but he was surprised to hear it was June. Bill looks at first like the healthy exception, energetic and hearty as the college football halfback he was before the war, but his impulse control is shot and he's always a shade too loud, too brawling, too eager to prove his prowess. Self-conscious as he is, easily humiliated by his inability to perform simple social tasks with his scarred and stiffened hands, Cary might actually be the most functional of the group, although he too displays a fatal carelessness toward himself. Nikki is unlike any female character I have seen in a long time, if ever. She has a distracted faun's face and no conversational filters; she paints her toenails because it "seemed like a good idea at the time" and peers nearsightedly, too unselfconsciously for affectation, through an antique lorgnette. She runs back to change her shoes before a trip "on account of I can walk faster in red shoes." Her bathtub is full of lily pads and turtles. I can't imagine her in a recent film; the gravitational pull of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be too strong. I can't imagine anything less pixie-like than Chandler's sideways, abstracted, curiously self-contained performance. We never learn any more of Nikki's history than her estranged family's wealth and a few disjointed anecdotes of her childhood ("And when I got home, my toes were spoiled"), but she's blown a fuse somewhere just as much as the boys around her; it is impossible to tell her degree of sobriety or inebriation because it makes no difference to whether she will track a conversation or step over it entirely. She's capable of linear interaction—when Shep cautions her that "Cary likes to be alone. He's as brittle as a breadstick. One silly crack from you and he might break up in sections," she responds with immediate decisiveness, "Well, then I don't think he should be left alone." More often she communicates in bright, drifting fragments like "I'll take vanilla" or "So now I don't let anyone kiss me—hard." And yet to describe her as flighty or ditzy or, God forbid, quirky seems existentially wrong. She is the grounding center of the ex-airmen's lives; she's in an eccentric orbit of her own. If she brought any of this essential strangeness to the role of Mina in the 1931 Dracula, I'm going to enjoy that film much more than I expected.
What else do you want to know? The opening credits are militarily stylized, changing titles with each earth-shaking blast of a field gun. The battle sequences in the first few minutes of the film look like a mix of historical footage and excerpts from other WWI pictures—I'm pretty sure I recognized a bombing from The Dawn Patrol. Everyone seemed so declamatory in the early hospital scenes that it took me at least one round of drunken surrealism to warm up to the characters, so give it time; not all of the dialogue is off-kilter gold or at least molybdenum. Some of it is very funny. The very last lines are among the most emotionally pitch-perfect endings I know. Internet research indicates that the film was a critical hit and a commercial flop; it was a passion project of Barthelmess' and I hope he would feel rewarded to know that his efforts created, if not a classic, then at least a cult film. It is weirder than The Sun Also Rises (1926) and way the hell better than The Lost Squadron (1932). This delightful experience brought to you by my helpful backers at Patreon.
1. I'll see him on Saturday as Jonathan Harker in Dracula (1931), but I noticed him last year as the star of Crooner (1932), a fictionalized history of the megaphone crooner craze as a boom-and-bust fame story with fantastically racy jokes. My personal favorite, which wouldn't have flown a few years later: to convey the extraordinary and unprecedented sex appeal of the protagonist's singing style, the camera pans across a nightclub to the honey-melting croon of "Three's a Crowd" and we see, table by table, all the women looking dreamy-eyed and excited, all the men looking resentful and unimpressed, until we reach the dreamy-eyed young man who gushes, "I think he's superb," and the very butch woman next to him who says unimpressedly, "He's lousy."
2. Like, we can argue about the degree to which toilet humor in a movie is a good thing, but I was still surprised at an eighty-four-year-old film containing a scene in which a character is incredibly relieved to discover that the drunk next to him only poured a glass of beer down his leg.
3. I will never pass up an opportunity to recommend William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), where the protagonist gets out of the army with a morphine habit and the film condemns the institutions that smugly punish him for it. I will have to see Barthelmess sometime in one of his silent starring roles, because based on his pre-Code work and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), my current image of him is the go-to guy for fucked-up disillusion.
nineweaving: "Oh, man. I have to get this down for Patreon. That is possibly the single weirdest film I've seen about World War I."Remember when I said that if the protagonists of The Dawn Patrol (1938) survived, they'd fit right in with Hemingway's lost generation? Meet the cast of The Last Flight, American ex-servicemen drinking away their days in Paris in 1919. All of them were flyers in the war, all of them invalided out with visible and invisible injuries; their doctors have written them off as "spent bullets . . . like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement . . . useless." They never talk about going home. Shep Lambert (David Manners1) has an elegant clownish face and wears dark glasses to hide the nervous twitch in one eye; it goes away if he's drunk enough, so he makes sure he always is. Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) burned his hands to the bone bringing them both down safely in a flaming plane; less outgoing than his friend, he carries himself with a wary defensiveness, preemptively cold-shouldering pity, mockery, gratitude. Their old comrades are boisterous, folksy Bill (Johnny Mack Brown) and sleepy-eyed Francis (Elliott Nugent), the sharpshooter of the squadron formerly known as "Sudden Death." When they discover a slender, spacey girl (Helen Chandler) standing at the bar of Claridge's with a stranger's false teeth clasped gravely in a champagne glass between her hands, they recognize her as one of their disconnected own: "Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne. Boys, she's going to be a lot of trouble!" Last and least welcome, Frink (Walter Byron) is the sixth wheel of the group, a pushy journalist with a creeper's manners and a moustache like the villain in a melodrama—but so long as he behaves himself, nobody cares enough about him to throw him out. And then, once the script has assembled all of these intriguing characters in the same city, almost nothing happens.
The film is nearly plotless. There's a flurry of activity near the end as several characters self-destruct in linked succession, but few of these interactions feel inevitably driven so much as plausibly stupid. The opening and closing scenes suffer from the need to say something important about the war experience and mostly just come off as sententious. In between, however, The Last Flight reproduces with startling fidelity the experience of spending a lost weekend with five very interesting, very damaged, very drunk people who have no intention of sobering up any time soon. They talk in banter, in-jokes and non sequiturs, ticcing a funny line around the conversation like the hiccups. Absurdism is a competitive sport. No one has any attention span. Someone hears about a fight and everyone rushes out into the hall to see it; someone wants to get away to Lisbon and everyone else piles into the train; a hotel elevator turns into a flight simulator with two different pilots at the controls. The script is pre-Code, so there's a running joke of increasingly outlandish euphemisms for excusing oneself for the bathroom: "He went off to sharpen his skates . . . shave a horse . . . tame an alligator . . . take a Chinese singing lesson."2 Just the quantities of alcohol drunk by all characters at all times would have disqualified it in the days of the Production Code. After the seven-minute mark, I don't think there's anyone onscreen who's sober. Sometimes they're adorable, sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes you just want to stuff them all in a drawer and tell them to shut up. In short, they can be exactly as exhausting and vulnerable as real drunk people, and the film doesn't try to corral them into a three-act drama: they simply appear to exist in a narrative as unstructured and impulsive as their deliberately aimless lives. Even for pre-Code cinema, this is a strikingly modern approach—I expect to find it in the French New Wave, not 1930's Hollywood. The recurring mottos of the story are "Who cares?" and "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
And the damage is real, even more so than I expected from other films of the era.3 Francis sets his pocket watch to wake him at regular intervals because otherwise he drifts away into a permanent narcoleptic daze; he says little because he slurs even when more or less sober. Affable Shep is scarily disoriented, forgetting not just days of the week, but calendar dates and cities—"I kind of lose track of things," he apologizes airily, but he was surprised to hear it was June. Bill looks at first like the healthy exception, energetic and hearty as the college football halfback he was before the war, but his impulse control is shot and he's always a shade too loud, too brawling, too eager to prove his prowess. Self-conscious as he is, easily humiliated by his inability to perform simple social tasks with his scarred and stiffened hands, Cary might actually be the most functional of the group, although he too displays a fatal carelessness toward himself. Nikki is unlike any female character I have seen in a long time, if ever. She has a distracted faun's face and no conversational filters; she paints her toenails because it "seemed like a good idea at the time" and peers nearsightedly, too unselfconsciously for affectation, through an antique lorgnette. She runs back to change her shoes before a trip "on account of I can walk faster in red shoes." Her bathtub is full of lily pads and turtles. I can't imagine her in a recent film; the gravitational pull of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be too strong. I can't imagine anything less pixie-like than Chandler's sideways, abstracted, curiously self-contained performance. We never learn any more of Nikki's history than her estranged family's wealth and a few disjointed anecdotes of her childhood ("And when I got home, my toes were spoiled"), but she's blown a fuse somewhere just as much as the boys around her; it is impossible to tell her degree of sobriety or inebriation because it makes no difference to whether she will track a conversation or step over it entirely. She's capable of linear interaction—when Shep cautions her that "Cary likes to be alone. He's as brittle as a breadstick. One silly crack from you and he might break up in sections," she responds with immediate decisiveness, "Well, then I don't think he should be left alone." More often she communicates in bright, drifting fragments like "I'll take vanilla" or "So now I don't let anyone kiss me—hard." And yet to describe her as flighty or ditzy or, God forbid, quirky seems existentially wrong. She is the grounding center of the ex-airmen's lives; she's in an eccentric orbit of her own. If she brought any of this essential strangeness to the role of Mina in the 1931 Dracula, I'm going to enjoy that film much more than I expected.
What else do you want to know? The opening credits are militarily stylized, changing titles with each earth-shaking blast of a field gun. The battle sequences in the first few minutes of the film look like a mix of historical footage and excerpts from other WWI pictures—I'm pretty sure I recognized a bombing from The Dawn Patrol. Everyone seemed so declamatory in the early hospital scenes that it took me at least one round of drunken surrealism to warm up to the characters, so give it time; not all of the dialogue is off-kilter gold or at least molybdenum. Some of it is very funny. The very last lines are among the most emotionally pitch-perfect endings I know. Internet research indicates that the film was a critical hit and a commercial flop; it was a passion project of Barthelmess' and I hope he would feel rewarded to know that his efforts created, if not a classic, then at least a cult film. It is weirder than The Sun Also Rises (1926) and way the hell better than The Lost Squadron (1932). This delightful experience brought to you by my helpful backers at Patreon.
1. I'll see him on Saturday as Jonathan Harker in Dracula (1931), but I noticed him last year as the star of Crooner (1932), a fictionalized history of the megaphone crooner craze as a boom-and-bust fame story with fantastically racy jokes. My personal favorite, which wouldn't have flown a few years later: to convey the extraordinary and unprecedented sex appeal of the protagonist's singing style, the camera pans across a nightclub to the honey-melting croon of "Three's a Crowd" and we see, table by table, all the women looking dreamy-eyed and excited, all the men looking resentful and unimpressed, until we reach the dreamy-eyed young man who gushes, "I think he's superb," and the very butch woman next to him who says unimpressedly, "He's lousy."
2. Like, we can argue about the degree to which toilet humor in a movie is a good thing, but I was still surprised at an eighty-four-year-old film containing a scene in which a character is incredibly relieved to discover that the drunk next to him only poured a glass of beer down his leg.
3. I will never pass up an opportunity to recommend William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), where the protagonist gets out of the army with a morphine habit and the film condemns the institutions that smugly punish him for it. I will have to see Barthelmess sometime in one of his silent starring roles, because based on his pre-Code work and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), my current image of him is the go-to guy for fucked-up disillusion.
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I really liked it! I would not have guessed from Wings (1927) and The Dawn Patrol—both of which are very traditionally plotted—that Saunders could write such a pure mood piece, which leaves me wondering about both the source material and the influence of the director, whose first English-language film this was. (Seriously, I know almost nothing about William Dieterle. I've wanted to see Sex in Chains (1928) for some time on general grounds of early queer cinema, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) is a lot of star-studded fun and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) is actually a terrific version of the story—a freaky New England Gothic with Walter Huston as a folksy, fiddle-playing Devil—but I have to resort to IMDb for the rest of his filmography. I would like very much to know if The Last Flight resembles his German films or if it really is its own thing entirely.) Either way, it really doesn't behave like any of its closest relatives, Hemingway included, and it didn't even end the way I was guessing. I recommend it pretty much without reservation, except for the sententious army doctors. [edit] Slightly more detailed reactions on LJ here.
Belated comment is belated
Re: Belated comment is belated
Re: Belated comment is belated
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Yes, I think so. It's an early talkie, so it has both technical issues and aesthetic departures from modern convention; it has some lines that are terrible for good reasons—perfectly in character—and some lines that are just terrible. Parts of the script verge into Dada, so if that's not something an audience enjoys, the conversations are going to bore and/or annoy them. But it also very clearly has its own style, its own registers of language, and it's not plotless because no one in the production understood structure, it's plotless because these people's lives are going nowhere and the film's going with them. And everyone really can act. And there is some really lovely cinematography. And it isn't like anything I have seen from 1931.
in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Saunders serves as a punchline in biographies of the Fitzgeralds to a drunken joke, but he was Fitzgerald's age, from Minnesota, and was paid a huge sum for Paramount for the rights to his unfinished novel Wings, the adaptation of which went on to win the first Oscar. Saunders married Fay Wray, but the marriage broke up because of his addictions, and his end is very sad. There's a not-bad bio here http://moirasthread.blogspot.com/2008/04/john-monk-saunders-something-in-air.html (Despite the name that's not a blog of mine!) Supposedly Nikki was based on Fay Wray, although I don't know how true that is. He was definitely a member of the Lost Generation, one who "didn't get over" and was haunted by war the rest of his life, especially because he didn't experience it first-hand.
The stories were called "Nikki and Her War Birds", serialized in Liberty (where Fitzgerald's work also appeared) and published as a novel in 1930 called Single Lady, which was a working title for the film. Another one was Spent Bullets. http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2014/Brooklyn%20NY%20Standard%20Union/Brooklyn%20NY%20Standard%20Union%201931/Brooklyn%20NY%20Standard%20Union%201931%20-%202672.pdf So Nikki goes from stories, to novel, to film, to musical.
Two of the stories recently
running in the Liberty Magazine
are being given screen treatment
and will soon go into production....
First National purchased John
Monk Saunders' stories of
"Nikki and Her Warbirds," later
published as "The Single Lady.*'
Richard Barthelmess, who has
been wanting to do another
aviation picture, will be given
the lead—and the answer to his
prayer.
I found some quotes from Mick La Salle's 2002 book, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man:
"These men are past an interest in sex, too smashed up inside for small human things to make much difference. Their playful mooning over [Nikki's] legs, feet, and back is ghostly, as if evoking a dim memory when such things were to live and die for...."
"Nikki isn't a woman of the world, but an airy figure with a child's honesty and an adult's sadness, a female version of the men. (Chandler, whose own hopeless alcoholism would lead to tragedy, couldn't help but bring a special truth to the role.)" (p. 100)
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Yes! I read that and was delighted.
There's a not-bad bio here
Thank you for this. It's mostly information I didn't have; I'm glad the author also appreciated The Last Flight. That is a great photograph of Wellman on the set of Wings.
Mick La Salle's 2002 book, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man
I've been looking for that in used book stores ever since discovering LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) in the basement of the Harvard Book Store over the summer! Do you own a copy?
I think I disagree with LaSalle's characterization of Nikki as a child-woman, because that is a more familiar archetype than whatever it is that she is, but otherwise I like the way he writes about the film.
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
I love some of the other bits in this, like the "Wallace Beery Gets Correctly Executed in Gangster Picture" headline (and accompanying story), and this:
Having successfully managed to sing while cavorting on roller skates, Beatrice Lillie won't be happy until she tries it while being tossed around by adagio dancers. She plans to make the attempt as soon as she finds the adagio dancers.
From the bits I have heard of her, that sounds typical.
Beatrice Lillie:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/93/f1/50/93f150ccdae27357e3d907c92aeac4d8.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G-BBjslYXPk/UQ_XET3A0gI/AAAAAAAAT_I/eOMcSwscgDA/s1600/bea+2.jpg
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
Re: in which there is way too much cinematic and literary trivia
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I was going to ask if Cary's war injury meant that he now has HOOKS FOR HANDS but I see from further on that no, the hands survived, just not very functionally.
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She's pretty much like that about everything!
I was going to ask if Cary's war injury meant that he now has HOOKS FOR HANDS but I see from further on that no, the hands survived, just not very functionally.
He's got all his fingers, but he has serious trouble with fine motor control—notably, he can't hold a glass one-handed, so he drinks his martinis while bracing them awkwardly between both hands. Nikki doesn't even realize it's a war injury, but he's sharply self-conscious of it. He has similar difficulty with lighters, although he practices at both actions over the course of the film.
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Never! That sounds really interesting. I'll look for it!
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But can she stop?
Amazing film. Thank you.
Nine
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I'm not sure she wants to.
Amazing film. Thank you.
You're welcome. I was really struck by it. Some of it is probably terrible, but the good stuff is ahead of its time by at least thirty years.
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You're welcome. I really wanted to share it. It is visibly an early sound picture and there are some dramatic conventions that have not held up so well, but so much of the rest of it is amazing.
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That's a very good way of describing it.
I think the only films by David Manners I've seen are Dracula, The Mummy, and The Black Cat, and he plays basically the same clueless romantic lead in all of them.
My God, I'd forgotten he was in The Mummy. I only ever remember Boris Karloff.
You will really enjoy Crooner if you can find it. It's the earliest movie I've seen where success goes disastrously to a pop star's head; it's all about the way technology changes the face of pop culture. Manners plays Ted, the amiable saxophone-playing bandleader of a college-buddy jazz band—"Teddy Taylor & His Collegians"—who gets thrust out in front of the audience one night when the actual lead singer turns up too hungover to perform. He's no Caruso, but he can carry a tune; what he can't do is be heard over the music until a helpful drunk sticks a megaphone in his hand, at which point Ted's pleasant but unexceptional voice is transformed into pure amplified S.A. and the ladies go wild. Overnight, crooning becomes the new sensation. The straight female population of New York City beats a path to the Golden Slipper, then to their radio sets when the band makes the jump to the airwaves. Bedroom sets fly off the shelves. The fan mail pours in faster than anyone at the station can read it. And in the meantime Ted is turning into the classic fame monster, discarding his old friends, affecting a British accent (complete with French malaprops), even faking a concert-canceling throat ailment in order to shack up with a glamorous socialite. Manners is terrific throughout, sympathetic in the early scenes when he's just one more struggling musician, hilariously willing to turn the pretentiousness up to eleven as the grade-A buffoon Ted's inflated ego turns him into. The ending is slightly unconvincing, mostly because it isn't as cynical as the rest of the picture, but Manners sells it. I didn't realize he was in The Last Flight when I rented it, but he was definitely a contributing factor to my enjoyment. He co-stars with Barbara Stanwyck in The Miracle Woman (1931), so I feel I should check that out.
(especially compared to Lupita Tovar in the Spanish-language version)
I really need to see that!
Dwight Frye's Renfield is probably my favorite thing about it.
I've heard nothing but good things about him.
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I'm always amazed by how much people drink in old films, and how normalized it is; at least this cast has its reasons. Watching The Thin Man, I kept thinking that one day everybody onscreen would be dead of liver failure and probably distinctly sooner than they thought, so they'd better solve that damn case quick.
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I keep trying to compare it to other films of its decade and failing. Technically, stylistically, it's obviously of its time, but otherwise I really keep falling back on the French New Wave.* The way it just hangs out with its characters, holding scenes longer than strictly necessary, because information (these people have a lot of problems and drink too much) is less important than atmosphere (and here's what it's like to spend time with them). I'm used to pre-Code movies not judging their characters in ways that would be compulsory a handful of years later, but The Last Flight doesn't even seem to be subverting moral conventions so much as completely not caring about them. And the diversity of the veterans' damage amazes me—I'm familiar with the traditional symptoms of shell-shock or symbolism of physical loss, but I've never seen anyone like Francis who just sleeps all the time unless woken and spaces out even then; it's gently comedic, a silent character in a crowd of fast talkers, but it's also distressing. Bill has totally realistic PTSD. Shep looks like a classic jazz-age study in flippant self-destruction, but Cary really worries about him and so do we. And nothing in the script explains Nikki and nothing needs to. It's like A-list outsider art. I'd love to know Dieterle's thoughts on the film; what he brought to it. It was his first English-language production. He had emigrated to Hollywood only the year before.
* Italian neorealism also a possibility. When I described the film to my mother, it reminded her of La Dolce Vita (1960).
Watching The Thin Man, I kept thinking that one day everybody onscreen would be dead of liver failure and probably distinctly sooner than they thought, so they'd better solve that damn case quick.
I cannot imagine drinking that many martinis in my life.
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I knew the former fact, but not the latter (about Saunders; I knew about Herbert Marshall's leg). Link?
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Zombie Thread
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Frink is an odd duck. He's a reporter for a New York newspaper, or is he? I think he is, and I wonder if he is supposed to be reporting on the Americans who haven't come home. He seems not to be any flavor of veteran himself, and I wonder whether he didn't fight and resents the ravaged men who did---for being so weak as to be damaged, for doing what he couldn't, I don't know.
As ever, it's worth observing that their old-style martinis are smaller than the big gulps served in all the bars nowadays. They look to be about an ounce and a half.
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I'm so glad! I love it and almost no one seems to know it exists. I appreciate
Barthelmess looks unexpectedly like a gracile Shackleton.
I had to take a moment to locate a photograph, but I can see why you say that. Some of it is the patent leather hair, but it's also the delicately squared face. I happen to think Richard Bathelmess was beautiful.
Nikki's PTSD is riveting, and the way she responds to the damaged people she's picked up by gradually, sporadically, coming into focus, is heartbreaking.
That's beautifully described.
I don't know if she and Cary can survive the Twenties.
I don't know if they can, either, but I would like them to. Then I can worry about them facing the war that followed the war to end all wars.
He seems not to be any flavor of veteran himself, and I wonder whether he didn't fight and resents the ravaged men who did---for being so weak as to be damaged, for doing what he couldn't, I don't know.
I really think he is the journalist that he introduces himself as, and I agree with you that I don't think he fought—he would have a different relationship with the other four men if he had. He would have a war story to compare with theirs and he has none, not even a self-congratulatory one. He's the one they tweak for not having the shakes, mock-testing him by balancing drinks on the backs of his hands and then leaving them there, his perfectly steady hands useless. He's the "whole" man of the five, but there's not much to him.
As ever, it's worth observing that their old-style martinis are smaller than the big gulps served in all the bars nowadays. They look to be about an ounce and a half.
They still drink a lot of them.
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Lowering the tone
Re: Lowering the tone
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https://www.amazon.com/review/R2CT5QKROL2I8V (link goes to a review which kindly transcribes the TOC -- it looks like there may be other good things in it too)
Am attempting to acquire; will report back if interesting.
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Please do! Speaking of film criticism, have you seen this post on Helen Chandler and The Last Flight?
(The entire site is a screaming time sink, be warned.
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On the basis of Way Down East and Tol'able David, circa 1921 he seems to have been the go-to guy for "innocent farmboy", which I find amusing.
(Somewhere in the multiverse, Richard Barthelmess is Luke Skywalker.)
LaSalle found a quote from him where he described himself as "the screen's champion underdog", which seems like a common thread through many of his roles.
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Watching those movies is going to be so weird for me. Like the time I discovered Roddy McDowall in The Legend of Hell House (2011) and then saw him as a child actor in Lassie Come Home (1943).
(Somewhere in the multiverse, Richard Barthelmess is Luke Skywalker.)
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
LaSalle found a quote from him where he described himself as "the screen's champion underdog", which seems like a common thread through many of his roles.
I agree with that. It is certainly characteristic of his pre-Code roles, where he always seems to be on the hard side of justice, but doing his best to make it better, often on behalf of others more than himself. I should write about Massacre (1934); that film is such a mess, but it's such an interesting mess.
(I should really read my copy of Dangerous Men; I have been saving it for a special occasion and now it's in that state where it gets indefinitely postponed because I'm not sure the occasion is special enough, which is ridiculous.)
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