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It's like being in love with a buzz saw
I have no grand unifying theory of Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (1939). I just love it so much, even a decade on I have not figured out how to talk about it. If I love it that much, I owe it to the movie to try.
I will give the director of the Harvard Film Archive credit for inspiring me with an angle: the moment he referred in his introduction to the film's "doomed romanticism," I disagreed so violently that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch received several clandestine but profane text messages about it. Say whatever else you want about love in Only Angels Have Wings, it's not romantic. It's reliable and terrifying, absurd and lethal. It makes people miss boats and kick chairs and memorize eye charts and throw up. "I loved them," says the narrator of Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight," "as poets love the poetry / that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea." So the hard-drinking pilots of Barranca Airways love the air under the metal wings of their planes, even when it's too thin or too shallow or too full of birds and rain and trees. Barranca is a port town in South America, its location Ruritanianly vague except that it's hemmed in by steep mountains whose only break is a treacherous fog-crammed pass full of condors and bad weather. Newer planes might clear the peaks outright, but the airmail outfit owned by Sig Ruman's "Dutchy" Van Ruyter and run by Cary Grant's Geoff Carter is stuck with ten-year-old crates like the Hamilton H-47 and the Pilgrim 100-B, the best of which max out at an insufficient 15,000 feet, so they fly by instruments and instinct and all too often somebody "draw[s] spades." If they can get the mail through on schedule for six months, the airline will get a regular contract and "plenty of money, no more secondhand junk to fly." In the meantime, like the fatalistic airmen of Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930) who sang out hurrah for the next man that dies, Geoff and his pilots face their slim chances by treating death like something that happens to other people—and when it happens to one of them, by not giving death the satisfaction of knowing it made a difference. "Who's dead?" they ask after the fatal crash which jars the opening scenes from romantic-comedy exotica into something simultaneously harder-edged and more deeply feeling. "Who's Joe? Anybody know a Joe?" while another man digs into the steak he ordered and the girl he was going to eat it with looks on in horror, not yet understanding the ritual function of this consensus carelessness. "That's right. He's been dead for about twenty minutes and all the weeping and wailing in the world won't make him any deader twenty years from now." And yet this is not one of those movies where a woman finds acceptance within a masculine community only by acceding to its codes; it's a movie about the attractions and limits of machismo, an adventure film within which it is possible and perhaps obligatory to discuss the precision timing of its screwball comedy and its slow-burn melodrama, and nothing in it is taken lightly except the things that deserve to be, like death. Above all, it's a movie without hearts or flowers or even always that much heteronormativity in which love can be resisted no more readily than aerodynamics. Passing through on the banana boat from Valparaiso to Panama, Jean Arthur's Bonnie Lee isn't supposed to stay more than the night in Barranca, thermite physical chemistry with Geoff notwithstanding. She stays a week and the movie happens.
Part of my trouble with this film, I think, is that I want to be completist about it and it's as intricate as one of its own engines; the plot as scripted by Jules Furthman takes one triangle of tension and interlocks it with another and the next thing you know you have geodesy, but its moving parts can be as ephemeral as matches or as enduring as reputations, as unaffordable as a new Ford Trimotor or as easily pocketed as an oft-flipped coin, and they all add up to such an knockabout, thrilling, lived-in week that I'm always surprised the movie only runs two hours, but there's no easy entrance except where we come in, with Bonnie both spellbound and aghast at the seat-of-the-pants lifestyle of the Barranca flyers, exemplified by Geoff with his deliberate, cynical practice of non-attachment and his mantra that he "wouldn't ask any woman to do anything," which isn't the same thing as not expecting it of them. I don't care that Jean Arthur felt she was miscast as the romantic lead of Angels and Hawks agreed, I can't picture another "Hawksian woman" in the role. Bacall would have been too cool, Russell too decisive, Hepburn too elegant. (Malone would have caught the boat in the morning.) No naïf for all her blonde fine bones, Bonnie falls for Geoff in a big, bewildering way and Arthur isn't afraid to run with the goofiness and the fluster of her whirlwind impulses, emotionally fearless and touchingly insecure as she admits, "You know, the girl that got off that boat's the perfect stranger to me. I don't know. I don't know whether this is me or another fellow!" A professional entertainer by trade, she commandeers a jam session with engaging ease and knocks back a drink without missing her solo and almost falls through a suddenly opened door with the flat-footed full-body stumble of silent comedy, indignantly composure-grooming her way back out. I love her soft wry smile in Geoff's arms, literally swept off her feet thanks to the excuse of a misunderstanding: "Don't I have the darndest luck, losing one heel right after another?" Just because love's undignified doesn't mean it's not the real thing. It's just as well, because Grant as Geoff is actually, outrageously sexy, all tall dark tousle and smolder, carrying off a leather jacket, gaucho pants, and a low-slung gun with such dominant panache that it's no wonder his flyboys call him "Poppa." He gets my second favorite Code-dodging line in the movie, partly because for all the fine qualities I associate with Cary Grant, direct sexual intent is not usually one of them and yet as he pours a drink for Bonnie and she asks pointedly when he's going to get some sleep, there's no mistaking the heat in his reply, "After your boat sails." He's not coldly magnetic; his authority goes along with a lively, inviting charm, hoisting an old flame into the air for a parting kiss, scuffling like a schoolboy with his best friend, dumping a pitcher of ice water over his head to clear it. But there's a door closed in his heart and he makes no bones about the sign on it. "Women think they can take it, but they can't. The minute you get up in the air, they start calling the airport—and when you get down, you find them waiting for you so scared, they hate your insides." He had a girl once he thought could take it; she couldn't. "She told me if I wouldn't quit flying, it was all off . . . I'm still flying." It doesn't seem likely that he'll quit for Bonnie, either, no matter how strong the sparks between them, but then what's the alternative? That she become 1939's answer to the Cool Girl, effortlessly grinning and bearing her man's devotion to something that isn't her, something that could kill him so easily that he won't plan for the future even so far as carrying his own damn matches, never mind a life together on anything but his own zipless terms? Men must work and women must have feelings about it? Well, no, actually, which is where the Kid comes in.
If you want proof that this movie recognizes that emotions like love and grief and anxiety are not inherently gendered, no matter how adamantly some of its characters may insist to the contrary, Thomas Mitchell's "Kid" Dabb is it. Identified to Bonnie and the viewer as "Geoff's best friend," he's the elder despite his nickname, a comfortably burly man with one of those rumpled, quizzical faces that'll look boyish until he goes grey. He knows his friend and boss to the point of clairvoyance, everything from passing the other man a lit cigarette before he can search his pockets to having a plane already standing by when Geoff decides a job's too risky for anyone else; in the gripping early scene where Geoff tries to talk a pilot through a landing in blind fog, the Kid is right there with him, assessing by ear the lines of approach and height that can't be seen. After twenty-two years "in it," he knows his profession so well that he's been flying almost literally blind for two months by the time the story starts. And he still gets sick with worry every time the man he loves takes to the air. That's not subtext. It's established out loud after Bonnie and the Kid have both watched Geoff testing a "smashed-up plane Mike stuck together with a little glue—or did you use baling wire this time?"; the crash that ends the experiment is survivable, but it leaves the Kid wiping his brow and muttering and Bonnie clutching her stomach in pained surprise, fortunately for the delicate sensibilities of the Production Code making it off camera before her breakfast comes up with her nerves. Afterward the Kid comes to check on her with some bromide and real talk about the emotional wear and tear of life with someone who's always risking his neck as if each day were his last and each flight might well be. He admits to the word love. It makes Bonnie burst out despairingly, "Why can't I love him the way you do? Why couldn't I sneer when he tries to kill himself, feel proud when he doesn't? Why couldn't I be there to meet him when he gets back? Why couldn't I—" and then just as she gets really launched on this self-flagellating litany of feminine frailty, it registers on her that the Kid isn't meeting her eyes. Falteringly, she asks, "What do you do when he doesn't come back when you expect him to?" Flatly, honestly, and in total defiance of Geoff's model of masculine stoicism, the Kid glances up at her through the tight-sliced shadows and answers, "I go nuts." I can think of any number of movies where the best friend serves as a kind of tacitly no-homo buffer between the heroine and the hero; I can think of very few where the best friend and the heroine straightforwardly commiserate over their shared feelings for the hero and I can't tell you how much I value Only Angels Have Wings for it. There's no possessiveness, no competition. The Kid doesn't razz her for anything he hasn't already wryly owned up to in himself. Better still, the film doesn't leave the equation one-sided, where it might be possible for the viewer to conclude that masculine affection is endurable where feminine attention is confining. Attempting in a later, tender, achingly adorable scene to assure Geoff that she's adapted to his way of life, Bonnie tells him as gravely as a vow, "I feel the same way about you the Kid does. Anything you do is all right with me . . . He doesn't ask you for anything, or get in your way, or bother you, does he?" Without missing a beat of their kiss, Geoff murmurs, "He drives me nuts." On cue, naturally, the Kid enters, double-takes, and then grins unstoppably at the two of them, a little embarrassed and not at all displeased. (He's apologetically come to retrieve Geoff for some airfield business, provoking my actual favorite Code-dodging line in the movie, as Bonnie riffs on the notion of a profitable fast-food concession in Geoff's bedroom, so many people seem to be passing through it that night: "Or perhaps you'd rather have all mustard and no hot dog.") Alas that the exigencies of the plot permit only about another twenty minutes of what was obviously one of the great OT3s of Golden Age Hollywood. Anybody who feels like writing it should let me know.
Only Angels Have Wings is also, of course, the film with which I discovered Richard Barthelmess, and even if the rest of it were merely fun or so-so, I might love it for his sake alone. I sketched his character some years ago: "an amazing interior performance as the disgraced and ostracized flyer in Angels, a man who enters every scene with his shoulders tensed and a wary, half-defiant flick of a look from under his brows, his mouth braced down like a tight little reverse smile. He never says anything to defend himself; his stone face is mistaken by the other pilots for a lack of shame. He has such thick dark lashes, every time he lowers his eyes is as good as a blow." I had not at that time seen him in either the original Dawn Patrol or its thematic sequel The Last Flight (1931); I didn't know that in the latter picture he'd played a pilot who refused to abandon his gunner in the flaming wreck of their plane. All I knew was neat-boned, self-contained, bitterly spoken Bat MacPherson, who once in similar straits "took to his parachute . . . and let his mechanic crash." His name was Kilgallen then; the man he abandoned was the Kid's younger brother. His new wife is the radiant Judy, whose name is never actually said three times in a row by Cary Grant; she doesn't know what her husband's done that the other flyers won't even take their drinks at the same table as him and he doesn't know that she once broke their boss' heart. In an ordinary drama, their secrets would be on a collision course, but because they are only two of the five protagonists in this movie, it's more like a game of pinball. Rita Hayworth in her breakout role is almost impossibly beautiful and brittle as only someone very young can be, but I was and remain transfixed by Barthelmess, who says as much with his body as he did in the days of his silent stardom while adding a dry tenor voice and timing practiced on the economical scripts of the pre-Codes. His confrontation with the Kid is defused by a gesture of submission as unambiguous as a person can offer without going to their knees; his medevac piloting in and out of the tricky mountainside of the San Felipe Mine gets its exhilarating authenticity from the stunt flying of Paul Mantz but its microexpressive kick from Barthelmess, showing through the minimal dialogue and the rear projection just how controlled and audacious Bat is in flight, how careful of his passengers, how painfully sensitive to even a hint of approval despite his dogged history and his "cast-iron crust." Nothing of what he's done is ever amended—the nastiest image in the film is the Kid yelling into the face of another flyer, like a foreshock of Randall Jarrell's Ball Turret Gunner, "He didn't kill your brother! You didn't have to pick anybody up with a sponge!" Nothing like that ever can be erased. All he can do, if he has it in him, is do better. The part doesn't play like a comeback or a callback; I still can't believe it was one of Barthelmess' last screen roles. His one real smile in the entire film is as swift and involuntary as a heartbeat, so shy it's heartbreaking. You could cry from just that flicker of his unguarded face and onscreen there's nothing to do but drink up.
I know I'm not saying much about the plot. There's a ton of it, but it doesn't feel crowded or over-engineered; it feels like the slightly ludicrous but crucially not implausible intensity of any supercharged situation, so that even airtight coincidence can be greeted with a why-not shrug and the next cigarette. No thread can be resolved without tightening or unraveling another. So many Chekhov's guns hang in plain sight, it makes as much sense as anything when a real one goes off in the third act. But that question of love keeps turning up like a trick coin tossed in the face of all the characters' evasions and protestations and plain old denial. "You can't keep that up forever," Judy warns Geoff after he reflexively runs his wouldn't-ask-any-woman line on her, who heard it first. Old pain makes her sibylline, knowing she's no longer speaking of herself: "You'll meet someone sometime you'll have to ask." But she doesn't know, the viewer doesn't know, Geoff doesn't want to find out what that will take, and so it too goes on the wall, ready to change everything.
I saw Only Angels Have Wings for the first time on a big screen on Friday; it was the opening film of the HFA's summer retrospective of Howard Hawks and it repeats again tonight if you can make the time. If you can't, there are the usual suspects of streaming video and an attractive Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD. Even in 4K restoration, the photography on this film is so beautiful that I had to check it wasn't Gregg Toland, sun-slatted, fog-swirled, low-lit as some soaring noir. It's Joseph Walker and everyone looks in his camera—even character players like Allyn Joslyn, Victor Kilian, or Manuel Álvarez Maciste—like they were sculpted out of silver or pewter or steel. Nothing human is that seamless or durable. That's all right. Outside of the lineage of WWI aviation films of which this movie really is the civilian counterpart, I tend to link it mentally with John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940) and not only because they are both movies I love that co-star Thomas Mitchell. They are portraits of communities as much as individuals; they come with their own rules and their own transgressions and they make me think increasingly of Le Guin's hand held out in the dark, like a kind of cosmic anti-horror. The sea will outlast whatever sails on it; the sky when you're in it's a cold equation; we're all alone, when you get right down to the dark. So we love the things that kill us and we hold on to each other as long as we can and that's all there is to do. Doomed romanticism, hooey. It's just called being alive. "Calling Barranca . . . Calling Barranca . . ." This flight brought to you by my asking backers at Patreon.
I will give the director of the Harvard Film Archive credit for inspiring me with an angle: the moment he referred in his introduction to the film's "doomed romanticism," I disagreed so violently that
spatch received several clandestine but profane text messages about it. Say whatever else you want about love in Only Angels Have Wings, it's not romantic. It's reliable and terrifying, absurd and lethal. It makes people miss boats and kick chairs and memorize eye charts and throw up. "I loved them," says the narrator of Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight," "as poets love the poetry / that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea." So the hard-drinking pilots of Barranca Airways love the air under the metal wings of their planes, even when it's too thin or too shallow or too full of birds and rain and trees. Barranca is a port town in South America, its location Ruritanianly vague except that it's hemmed in by steep mountains whose only break is a treacherous fog-crammed pass full of condors and bad weather. Newer planes might clear the peaks outright, but the airmail outfit owned by Sig Ruman's "Dutchy" Van Ruyter and run by Cary Grant's Geoff Carter is stuck with ten-year-old crates like the Hamilton H-47 and the Pilgrim 100-B, the best of which max out at an insufficient 15,000 feet, so they fly by instruments and instinct and all too often somebody "draw[s] spades." If they can get the mail through on schedule for six months, the airline will get a regular contract and "plenty of money, no more secondhand junk to fly." In the meantime, like the fatalistic airmen of Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930) who sang out hurrah for the next man that dies, Geoff and his pilots face their slim chances by treating death like something that happens to other people—and when it happens to one of them, by not giving death the satisfaction of knowing it made a difference. "Who's dead?" they ask after the fatal crash which jars the opening scenes from romantic-comedy exotica into something simultaneously harder-edged and more deeply feeling. "Who's Joe? Anybody know a Joe?" while another man digs into the steak he ordered and the girl he was going to eat it with looks on in horror, not yet understanding the ritual function of this consensus carelessness. "That's right. He's been dead for about twenty minutes and all the weeping and wailing in the world won't make him any deader twenty years from now." And yet this is not one of those movies where a woman finds acceptance within a masculine community only by acceding to its codes; it's a movie about the attractions and limits of machismo, an adventure film within which it is possible and perhaps obligatory to discuss the precision timing of its screwball comedy and its slow-burn melodrama, and nothing in it is taken lightly except the things that deserve to be, like death. Above all, it's a movie without hearts or flowers or even always that much heteronormativity in which love can be resisted no more readily than aerodynamics. Passing through on the banana boat from Valparaiso to Panama, Jean Arthur's Bonnie Lee isn't supposed to stay more than the night in Barranca, thermite physical chemistry with Geoff notwithstanding. She stays a week and the movie happens.Part of my trouble with this film, I think, is that I want to be completist about it and it's as intricate as one of its own engines; the plot as scripted by Jules Furthman takes one triangle of tension and interlocks it with another and the next thing you know you have geodesy, but its moving parts can be as ephemeral as matches or as enduring as reputations, as unaffordable as a new Ford Trimotor or as easily pocketed as an oft-flipped coin, and they all add up to such an knockabout, thrilling, lived-in week that I'm always surprised the movie only runs two hours, but there's no easy entrance except where we come in, with Bonnie both spellbound and aghast at the seat-of-the-pants lifestyle of the Barranca flyers, exemplified by Geoff with his deliberate, cynical practice of non-attachment and his mantra that he "wouldn't ask any woman to do anything," which isn't the same thing as not expecting it of them. I don't care that Jean Arthur felt she was miscast as the romantic lead of Angels and Hawks agreed, I can't picture another "Hawksian woman" in the role. Bacall would have been too cool, Russell too decisive, Hepburn too elegant. (Malone would have caught the boat in the morning.) No naïf for all her blonde fine bones, Bonnie falls for Geoff in a big, bewildering way and Arthur isn't afraid to run with the goofiness and the fluster of her whirlwind impulses, emotionally fearless and touchingly insecure as she admits, "You know, the girl that got off that boat's the perfect stranger to me. I don't know. I don't know whether this is me or another fellow!" A professional entertainer by trade, she commandeers a jam session with engaging ease and knocks back a drink without missing her solo and almost falls through a suddenly opened door with the flat-footed full-body stumble of silent comedy, indignantly composure-grooming her way back out. I love her soft wry smile in Geoff's arms, literally swept off her feet thanks to the excuse of a misunderstanding: "Don't I have the darndest luck, losing one heel right after another?" Just because love's undignified doesn't mean it's not the real thing. It's just as well, because Grant as Geoff is actually, outrageously sexy, all tall dark tousle and smolder, carrying off a leather jacket, gaucho pants, and a low-slung gun with such dominant panache that it's no wonder his flyboys call him "Poppa." He gets my second favorite Code-dodging line in the movie, partly because for all the fine qualities I associate with Cary Grant, direct sexual intent is not usually one of them and yet as he pours a drink for Bonnie and she asks pointedly when he's going to get some sleep, there's no mistaking the heat in his reply, "After your boat sails." He's not coldly magnetic; his authority goes along with a lively, inviting charm, hoisting an old flame into the air for a parting kiss, scuffling like a schoolboy with his best friend, dumping a pitcher of ice water over his head to clear it. But there's a door closed in his heart and he makes no bones about the sign on it. "Women think they can take it, but they can't. The minute you get up in the air, they start calling the airport—and when you get down, you find them waiting for you so scared, they hate your insides." He had a girl once he thought could take it; she couldn't. "She told me if I wouldn't quit flying, it was all off . . . I'm still flying." It doesn't seem likely that he'll quit for Bonnie, either, no matter how strong the sparks between them, but then what's the alternative? That she become 1939's answer to the Cool Girl, effortlessly grinning and bearing her man's devotion to something that isn't her, something that could kill him so easily that he won't plan for the future even so far as carrying his own damn matches, never mind a life together on anything but his own zipless terms? Men must work and women must have feelings about it? Well, no, actually, which is where the Kid comes in.
If you want proof that this movie recognizes that emotions like love and grief and anxiety are not inherently gendered, no matter how adamantly some of its characters may insist to the contrary, Thomas Mitchell's "Kid" Dabb is it. Identified to Bonnie and the viewer as "Geoff's best friend," he's the elder despite his nickname, a comfortably burly man with one of those rumpled, quizzical faces that'll look boyish until he goes grey. He knows his friend and boss to the point of clairvoyance, everything from passing the other man a lit cigarette before he can search his pockets to having a plane already standing by when Geoff decides a job's too risky for anyone else; in the gripping early scene where Geoff tries to talk a pilot through a landing in blind fog, the Kid is right there with him, assessing by ear the lines of approach and height that can't be seen. After twenty-two years "in it," he knows his profession so well that he's been flying almost literally blind for two months by the time the story starts. And he still gets sick with worry every time the man he loves takes to the air. That's not subtext. It's established out loud after Bonnie and the Kid have both watched Geoff testing a "smashed-up plane Mike stuck together with a little glue—or did you use baling wire this time?"; the crash that ends the experiment is survivable, but it leaves the Kid wiping his brow and muttering and Bonnie clutching her stomach in pained surprise, fortunately for the delicate sensibilities of the Production Code making it off camera before her breakfast comes up with her nerves. Afterward the Kid comes to check on her with some bromide and real talk about the emotional wear and tear of life with someone who's always risking his neck as if each day were his last and each flight might well be. He admits to the word love. It makes Bonnie burst out despairingly, "Why can't I love him the way you do? Why couldn't I sneer when he tries to kill himself, feel proud when he doesn't? Why couldn't I be there to meet him when he gets back? Why couldn't I—" and then just as she gets really launched on this self-flagellating litany of feminine frailty, it registers on her that the Kid isn't meeting her eyes. Falteringly, she asks, "What do you do when he doesn't come back when you expect him to?" Flatly, honestly, and in total defiance of Geoff's model of masculine stoicism, the Kid glances up at her through the tight-sliced shadows and answers, "I go nuts." I can think of any number of movies where the best friend serves as a kind of tacitly no-homo buffer between the heroine and the hero; I can think of very few where the best friend and the heroine straightforwardly commiserate over their shared feelings for the hero and I can't tell you how much I value Only Angels Have Wings for it. There's no possessiveness, no competition. The Kid doesn't razz her for anything he hasn't already wryly owned up to in himself. Better still, the film doesn't leave the equation one-sided, where it might be possible for the viewer to conclude that masculine affection is endurable where feminine attention is confining. Attempting in a later, tender, achingly adorable scene to assure Geoff that she's adapted to his way of life, Bonnie tells him as gravely as a vow, "I feel the same way about you the Kid does. Anything you do is all right with me . . . He doesn't ask you for anything, or get in your way, or bother you, does he?" Without missing a beat of their kiss, Geoff murmurs, "He drives me nuts." On cue, naturally, the Kid enters, double-takes, and then grins unstoppably at the two of them, a little embarrassed and not at all displeased. (He's apologetically come to retrieve Geoff for some airfield business, provoking my actual favorite Code-dodging line in the movie, as Bonnie riffs on the notion of a profitable fast-food concession in Geoff's bedroom, so many people seem to be passing through it that night: "Or perhaps you'd rather have all mustard and no hot dog.") Alas that the exigencies of the plot permit only about another twenty minutes of what was obviously one of the great OT3s of Golden Age Hollywood. Anybody who feels like writing it should let me know.
Only Angels Have Wings is also, of course, the film with which I discovered Richard Barthelmess, and even if the rest of it were merely fun or so-so, I might love it for his sake alone. I sketched his character some years ago: "an amazing interior performance as the disgraced and ostracized flyer in Angels, a man who enters every scene with his shoulders tensed and a wary, half-defiant flick of a look from under his brows, his mouth braced down like a tight little reverse smile. He never says anything to defend himself; his stone face is mistaken by the other pilots for a lack of shame. He has such thick dark lashes, every time he lowers his eyes is as good as a blow." I had not at that time seen him in either the original Dawn Patrol or its thematic sequel The Last Flight (1931); I didn't know that in the latter picture he'd played a pilot who refused to abandon his gunner in the flaming wreck of their plane. All I knew was neat-boned, self-contained, bitterly spoken Bat MacPherson, who once in similar straits "took to his parachute . . . and let his mechanic crash." His name was Kilgallen then; the man he abandoned was the Kid's younger brother. His new wife is the radiant Judy, whose name is never actually said three times in a row by Cary Grant; she doesn't know what her husband's done that the other flyers won't even take their drinks at the same table as him and he doesn't know that she once broke their boss' heart. In an ordinary drama, their secrets would be on a collision course, but because they are only two of the five protagonists in this movie, it's more like a game of pinball. Rita Hayworth in her breakout role is almost impossibly beautiful and brittle as only someone very young can be, but I was and remain transfixed by Barthelmess, who says as much with his body as he did in the days of his silent stardom while adding a dry tenor voice and timing practiced on the economical scripts of the pre-Codes. His confrontation with the Kid is defused by a gesture of submission as unambiguous as a person can offer without going to their knees; his medevac piloting in and out of the tricky mountainside of the San Felipe Mine gets its exhilarating authenticity from the stunt flying of Paul Mantz but its microexpressive kick from Barthelmess, showing through the minimal dialogue and the rear projection just how controlled and audacious Bat is in flight, how careful of his passengers, how painfully sensitive to even a hint of approval despite his dogged history and his "cast-iron crust." Nothing of what he's done is ever amended—the nastiest image in the film is the Kid yelling into the face of another flyer, like a foreshock of Randall Jarrell's Ball Turret Gunner, "He didn't kill your brother! You didn't have to pick anybody up with a sponge!" Nothing like that ever can be erased. All he can do, if he has it in him, is do better. The part doesn't play like a comeback or a callback; I still can't believe it was one of Barthelmess' last screen roles. His one real smile in the entire film is as swift and involuntary as a heartbeat, so shy it's heartbreaking. You could cry from just that flicker of his unguarded face and onscreen there's nothing to do but drink up.
I know I'm not saying much about the plot. There's a ton of it, but it doesn't feel crowded or over-engineered; it feels like the slightly ludicrous but crucially not implausible intensity of any supercharged situation, so that even airtight coincidence can be greeted with a why-not shrug and the next cigarette. No thread can be resolved without tightening or unraveling another. So many Chekhov's guns hang in plain sight, it makes as much sense as anything when a real one goes off in the third act. But that question of love keeps turning up like a trick coin tossed in the face of all the characters' evasions and protestations and plain old denial. "You can't keep that up forever," Judy warns Geoff after he reflexively runs his wouldn't-ask-any-woman line on her, who heard it first. Old pain makes her sibylline, knowing she's no longer speaking of herself: "You'll meet someone sometime you'll have to ask." But she doesn't know, the viewer doesn't know, Geoff doesn't want to find out what that will take, and so it too goes on the wall, ready to change everything.
I saw Only Angels Have Wings for the first time on a big screen on Friday; it was the opening film of the HFA's summer retrospective of Howard Hawks and it repeats again tonight if you can make the time. If you can't, there are the usual suspects of streaming video and an attractive Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD. Even in 4K restoration, the photography on this film is so beautiful that I had to check it wasn't Gregg Toland, sun-slatted, fog-swirled, low-lit as some soaring noir. It's Joseph Walker and everyone looks in his camera—even character players like Allyn Joslyn, Victor Kilian, or Manuel Álvarez Maciste—like they were sculpted out of silver or pewter or steel. Nothing human is that seamless or durable. That's all right. Outside of the lineage of WWI aviation films of which this movie really is the civilian counterpart, I tend to link it mentally with John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940) and not only because they are both movies I love that co-star Thomas Mitchell. They are portraits of communities as much as individuals; they come with their own rules and their own transgressions and they make me think increasingly of Le Guin's hand held out in the dark, like a kind of cosmic anti-horror. The sea will outlast whatever sails on it; the sky when you're in it's a cold equation; we're all alone, when you get right down to the dark. So we love the things that kill us and we hold on to each other as long as we can and that's all there is to do. Doomed romanticism, hooey. It's just called being alive. "Calling Barranca . . . Calling Barranca . . ." This flight brought to you by my asking backers at Patreon.
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He is great at it. I have good memories of him and Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and I was reasonably distracted there by Claude Rains. I remain slightly surprised there's not even a Yuletide fandom for him and Edward Everett Horton in Lost Horizon (1937). [edit] Okay, and Isabel Jewell. I forgot until I re-read the screenplay that Mitchell has pet names for them both. Your point is further proved.
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Nine
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You're welcome. I got sick of saying nothing.
(I did think seriously about attending the second screening, but instead I think I am going to make dinner with my new stove.)
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We made Monte Cristos! They was nowhere near as complicated to construct and cook as we had been expecting! Also delicious, as we had hoped.
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I had one at a restaurant once.
I apologize for the conspicuous subject-verb agreement failure in the above comment. I converted the sentence to the plural to accord with the fact that we made three sandwiches, not one collective noun's worth of Monte Cristo, but then I forgot the actual verb. I have slept about three hours a night for at least the last three nights.
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"Barranca" makes me think simultaneously of "Avianca"--name of Colombia's national carrier--and "Barranquilla," a city name in Colombia--though not up in the mountains.
There's what looks like an almost complete version available on YouTube; putting it on the list for me and Wakanomori.
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I loved it from the first time I saw it; I've seen it half a dozen times since and every time something new has turned up. I used to say it was my favorite Hawks except for The Big Sleep (1946), but now I think I might as well drop that qualification. I write more easily about The Big Sleep.
I love the notion of five characters orbiting and interacting like that[<--epicycles! That's the word I wanted to describe this]
I like that! I tend to think of them in terms of interlocking triangles (any of which could furnish an A-plot on their own; it's why I'm not sure this movie has B-plots so much as a sort of revolving lighthouse beam of authorial attention) but I like your orrery better.
"Barranca" makes me think simultaneously of "Avianca"--name of Colombia's national carrier--and "Barranquilla," a city name in Colombia--though not up in the mountains.
Oh, neat. I think it may also just be a kind of craggy topography (internet translates "canyon" or "ravine," which would certainly suit the film's terrain), but I like that there are real-world echoes.
There's what looks like an almost complete version available on YouTube; putting it on the list for me and Wakanomori.
I really hope you enjoy it! It's also in the TCM buffer right now, if you have access to that.
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Thank you!
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They were, mow! I love the action scenes in this movie, whether they're the real thing or scaled down; the model work is good model work and the flying is good flying. The medevac scene is my favorite, though, and the HFA isn't an Omni theater, but it was vertiginous and beautiful and full of cliffs and horizon and light.
I still hope for a 35 mm print someday and you should watch it with me.