It's a slaughterhouse—and I'm the butcher

I didn't know The Dawn Patrol (1938) was a remake the first time I saw it, six years ago on TCM for Memorial Day. The Oscar-winning 1930 original was Howard Hawks' first sound film, it stars Richard Barthelmess and famously pissed off Howard Hughes¹ and someday I will see it for comparison, but it doesn't have Basil Rathbone, so I'm not talking about it tonight. The remake came around again on TCM a few days ago. rushthatspeaks has been very patient about listening to me ever since.

The year is 1915, the setting an RFC aerodrome near the front lines in France. Errol Flynn is billed above the title as Captain Courtney, the daredevil leader of "A" Flight; David Niven seconds him as the puckish, faithful Lieutenant Scott. They fly like they're immortal and drink like there's no tomorrow; all the other pilots they shipped out with are dead and they celebrate their fallen comrades and their own future with fire-eating fatalism, yelling out "Hurrah for the Next Man That Dies." If they beat the odds, they'll be model members of Hemingway's lost generation, directionless and disillusioned—in the meantime, they welcome a captured German pilot into their midst because he may not be able to speak the language, but he understands drinking to the dead. That he shot down at least one of their own makes no difference. They recognize the enemy on the other side of the lines, especially when personified by the undefeatable von Richthofen Richter, a veteran flying ace with a mocking habit of buzzing the airfield after a dogfight and dropping trophies from the British pilots he's downed—boots, goggles, like throwing back a catch too small to keep. Their real hatred is reserved for the commanding officers of their own side, the bureaucratic machine that keeps sending them rookie flyers as cannon fodder in a vicious cycle of attrition. "You're telling me that I'm expected to go out on a job like that with two inexperienced men," Courtney challenges after one especially hopeless briefing, only to be shut down with the terse rejoinder, "Those are the orders." So says squadron commander Major Brand, who gives out each day's suicidal instructions with little expression and less eye contact, very clipped and peremptory, like a pure mouthpiece of the war.² He's played by Basil Rathbone, which should make him the villain, especially opposite Errol Flynn. He's not the protagonist; that's legitimately the combination of Courtney and Scott, neither of whom is ever offscreen for more than a few minutes in the entire hour-and-three-quarters runtime. He is, naturally, the character I can't stop thinking about.

Even more so than any of his pilots, Brand is on the verge of cracking up. His job is to send green recruits just out of ground school against enemy forces that outclass them in both numbers and combat experience, predictably dooming most of them on their first flight, and the guilt and the responsibility and the endless deadly decision-making are splintering him apart.³ He can't take the dangerous missions himself; he's not allowed. He argues constantly with his superiors to give the new recruits a little time; his requests are constantly denied. He counts the drones of returning engines, knowing there will always be fewer than the number of planes that left; he drinks alone in his office while the rest of the 59th gets blind in the mess, partly out of ostracism, partly so they can't see how fast their commanding officer goes through a bottle; and he doesn't let anyone but his adjutant see him near breaking, so his men despise him as a mindless martinet who waves the new kids off like clockwork to the slaughter, not turning a hair when the casualty lists are read. It's clever casting. The audience has the advantage of meeting him early on in a moment of helpless fury, but come in late and you might take Brand for the cold fish he makes himself look like—that distant, icy carelessness was the hallmark of Rathbone's Marquis St. Evrémonde in A Tale of Two Cities (1935), and he's painfully good at converting Brand's raw nerves into a government-work facsimile of the stiff upper lip. He has a beautiful, almost shy smile, as if he's afraid someone is going to take it away. We don't see it very often.

( Fine! Right! Cheerio! )

I know artists' lives are not their work; it remains impossible for me not to wonder how one informs the other, especially when biography and subject material overlap conspicuously. Major Brand is seen to wear the ribbon of the Military Cross. Rathbone had won the same decoration in 1918 for actions as crazily reckless as anything in The Dawn Patrol, leading daylight raids through no man's land disguised, like Birnam Wood, with branches and leaves. His younger brother had been killed in action the month before. He doesn't sound, two decades later when he talks about his postwar experience, as though he dodged quite as much PTSD as he makes it sound to Photoplay. Of the three principals of The Dawn Patrol, he was the only one with combat experience. I don't want to pretend that I can see more of Rathbone in Brand than he made visible, but I don't want to imagine that acting just happens in a vacuum, either. Anyway, something clicked between the actor and the part: he's third-billed, but he's the one I just wrote 2100 words about. This admiration brought to you by my better-adjusted backers at Patreon.

1. Hughes had been developing the similarly themed Hell's Angels since 1927; he sued Warner Bros. for plagiarism with the result that The Dawn Patrol beat Hell's Angels into theaters by four months and Hughes lost the lawsuit. I haven't seen Hell's Angels myself, but since it was partly directed by James Whale and stars Ben Lyon and Jean Harlow, I expect it's only a matter of time.

2. Major Brand is as far up the chain of command as we ever see. The "brass hats" above him are blaring, blurry voices on the other end of a telephone line, like Colonel Blimp by Charles Schultz. You can make out their dialogue if you concentrate, but it's oddly just as effective if you don't: they aren't speaking the same language anyway.

3. The dark-browed, gangly leader of the first set of new recruits is Lieutenant Russell, played by an uncredited John Rodion—otherwise known as Rodion Rathbone, born 1915, just before his father was called up to the Western Front. He doesn't last one mission, his proud eighteen hours in the air nothing against veteran enemies. "Poor little Cleaver went first—I don't believe he fired a shot. Russell must have gone about the same time. I didn't see." I don't know who in the audience would have caught it at the time, or if the general public was even intended to, but it's a biting in-joke, like subliminal Wilfred Owen: But the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one. [edit] According to a 1938 issue of Hollywood, Basil and Rodion were supposed to share a scene, but the experience was so "unnerving" that "Basil blew up in his lines."

4. Obviously the best thing for Brand would be getting sent home where no one needs him to make any decision more serious than how much sugar he wants in his tea—he reminds me of Wimsey in Whose Body? (1923) and Busman's Honeymoon (1937) and I'm not surprised—but getting kicked upstairs at least seems to remove him from his intolerable bind of too much responsibility and too little power and put him somewhere he might have a chance of arguing for less sweepingly wasteful tactics and being listened to. Since it keeps him alive and in presumably better mental health, anyway, I'll take it.