It feels reductive to describe Howard Hughes' legendary WWI aviation epic Hell's Angels (1930) as a hot mess, but there's no graceful way to say it: its action sequences are stunning, its production values spare no expense, Jean Harlow inaugurates an entire genre of pick-up lines, and the story is, well, it runs two hours plus entr'acte and exit music and there are certainly some actors in it with lines.
I can't really blame it. William Wellman was already pushing the norms of Hollywood producing when he took nine months of Paramount's time and $2 million of their money to film the groundbreaking aerial combat scenes of Wings (1927), but Hughes' independent riposte would cost him three years and nearly $3 million and in the meantime generate a cavalcade of tsuris including but not limited to cast changes, stunt crashes, a lawsuit which it lost, a partial reshoot and total rewrite following the coming of sound, and a five-director game of musical chairs that ultimately resolved on Hughes himself with assistance from James Whale, fresh off the Broadway production of Journey's End and appalled by the script. It was like the Big Dig of pre-Code Hollywood. Production went on for so long that not only did Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930) beat its competitor to the box office by several months despite starting production two and a half years later, so did Whale's own screen version of Journey's End (1930), for which he had to travel to England and by the time he got back Hell's Angels was still going on. Out of a mix-up like that, if you're lucky you get Cleopatra (1963). If you're not lucky, you get Heaven's Gate (1980). Hughes lost neither his shirt nor his studio—and he did not lose his life even when he augured himself into the ground performing an aerobatic stunt his pilots had correctly warned him would end in a crash—but the divers hands told on the plot, which is surprisingly lackadaisical for something that starts with a duel and ends with an execution and sticks the war to end all wars in between. In theory I like the idea of a love triangle that's just a three-way bad romance, but the practice of casting Harlow as a London socialite and the equally American James Hall and Ben Lyon as a pair of brothers who enlist in the Royal Flying Corps right out of their rooms at Oxford renders the firing of original star Greta Nissen for her Norwegian accent a rather mean joke; she cannot possibly have sounded less British than Harlow asking Lyon if he would be shocked if she put on something more comfortable, although in all fairness Harlow with her incandescent dirty grin sells it. If there are only three characters of any appreciable depth in a movie, I prefer it if the characterizations of two of them do not swing wildly round the compass depending on the scene. And while it intrigues me that the film's ending is disillusioned enough to pass for the anti-Wings, I wish I did not keep worrying that the most interesting aspects of the script were inadvertent.
I have a lot of trouble telling, for example, how the film wants us to feel about Lyon's Monte Rutledge, the wastrel brother for whom the gallant, responsible Roy (Hall) is always having to cover—charming and cheerful though he may be, surely it can't approve of him funking a duel in pre-war Berlin and leaving his brother to cop a bullet in his stead, or sleeping with his brother's free-spirited beloved Helen (Harlow) and then slut-shaming her while concealing his own part in the affair, or malingering in wartime France so that other men have to take his place on the night patrol and "go west"? He has the weak character's saving grace of knowing it, but it never stops him from doing the expedient thing. Even his recruitment is an accident of bravado and peer pressure, heckled by passersby into signing his life away for a kiss from a pretty girl. By the time we reached the Western Front, I was not surprised to hear him express the sole anti-war sentiments of the picture; it got my attention, however, that the picture appeared to believe him. Monte's arguments are not just typical of pre-Code pacifism but shared by movies like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) where we are intended to agree with the characters who voice them. "What are you fighting for?" he screams at his fellow flyers, shaking with nerves and the adrenaline flashover of having just been called a coward in front of the entire mess. "Patriotism? Duty? Are you mad? Can't you see they're just words—words coined by politicians and privateers to trick you into fighting for them? . . . Yellow, am I? You're the ones that are yellow. I've got guts to say what I think. You're afraid to say it—so afraid to be called yellow, you'd rather be killed first!" That's great pre-Code complexity. Even a stopped clock can strike it right every twelve hours and even a slacker can call out the dulce et decorum lies of war. The next shot is one of my favorites, tightly theatrical and suggestive of the character drama Hughes was not interested in making, Monte slumped in his bunk illuminated by a kerosene lantern that shows his face half-hidden in his hand and leaves the rest of the darkness pressing in on all sides. (I know it's supposed to mark him out as a misfit and a disgrace, but Lyon sloping and slouching around the barracks in an old jumper instead of his maternity jacket, his jaw five o' clock shadowed and his normally patent leather hair tousled all over his forehead, honestly looks his best all movie. If he could only manage a credible English accent, he could have wandered over from the trenches of Journey's End.) The problem is that while he's damaged and sympathetic here, elsewhere the script can't decide from scene to scene whether he's likeably irresponsible, contemptibly spineless, or realistically cracking up, and while Lyon—whom I like—commits like a pro to whichever interpretation is uppermost in its thoughts, the results still play like three different drafts of one character and for all I know they may be. Harlow's Helen is just as inconsistently split. The film can't make up its mind whether her zipless hedonism should be seen as liberated or just slutty; it's wolf-whistle funny when she really does shock Monte with the line about something more comfortable and her refusal to go through even the motions of romantic love and matrimony is sort of backhandedly feminist, but the best thing I can say about the resolution of her subplot is that at least in 1930 she didn't have to die for breaking Roy's heart and confirming Monte's misogyny and absolutely nothing but Harlow's nascent star power holds her last, spitefully illusion-smashing speech together.
I think the film may have wanted to contrast the brothers with the ideals of their genre, presenting them as not just foils of one another but incomplete parts of a tragic hero. Neither is much to speak of in the singular; Roy is dutiful and idealistic in exactly the way of doomed youth in this cannon-fodder war, but Monte's more cynical realism doesn't make up for his missing backbone. Neither route leads to heroism. Is there any such thing in this war? At the last minute, their eternally mixed motives come together in just about the only scene where I felt the script rather than the spectacle carried the emotional force it was aiming for: they get the job done, but at a cost of massive irony, intermingling love and betrayal with the audience's awareness that no one who wasn't there will ever know the difference. If this was the intended theme, however, it's too drawn out and diffuse to register until very late in the game and in any case the project is let down by the acting of Hall, who I suspect would have shown to much better advantage in the silent version of the film. He's most persuasive in the silent scenes patched in from the original shoot, where his dialogue is either overdubbed or nonexistent and any stiffness in his heavy, soulful face can come under the wire of the style. Any time he has to talk, however, he reminds me of why I stay away from even amateur acting, because I have heard how utterly unbelievable a human being can sound saying something as ordinary as "Oh . . . no," and unfortunately in a two-hour movie he has to talk a lot. I can't promise another actor would have fixed the problem, but I'm just saying, Joel McCrea couldn't have hurt.
Anyway, I promised stunning action sequences and I meant it. They are not just impressive for their time; in an age of CGI, they're extraordinary. Narratively, the bombing raid over London in the first act is marred by some lemming-like anti-German silliness, but the slow overhead shot of the Zeppelin as it slides out of the deep, roiling cloud cover with a heavy thrum of engines is still resounding through the Star Wars universe, its fetishistic attention to the dial-spinning, lever-throwing mechanics of making war a silent progenitor of generations of technobabble; the scramble of an intercepting flight offers a well-matched mix of model work and aerial photography, but the crash which caps the sequence took my breath away, a titanic, baleful, crumpling conflagration that does not once look as though double exposures are involved in the suicidal dive that ignites it or the flaming collapse that just misses incinerating our downed protagonists. The dogfight in the second act is almost certainly the most realistic representation I have ever seen of air combat in World War I. I don't mean just that it's performed in real time by real planes and real pilots, many of whom were veterans of the war they were reenacting: then I could praise it for authenticity, but the word I keep falling back on is not authentic but visceral. Counting the initial bombing of a German ammo dump in a captured Gotha G.IV (the Sikorsky S-29-A, which along with three stunt men and one mechanic gave its life for the production), the full sequence lasts just over twenty minutes and it's as tight and tempered and well-orchestrated as all the talk around it is not; after warming the audience up with some shed-splintering explosions, the first grade of action begins with von Richthofen and his Flying Circus mobbing the bomber like crows with a daylight owl and really kicks into gear with the arrival of two wings of reinforcements from Roy and Monte's aerodrome. There are long shots, close-ups, hovering points of view as intimate and disembodied as the air, mid-air collisions, individual engagements, screams, flames, profanity. The line of the horizon wheels over and the clouds veer sickeningly against the sun. You pick up a sense of tactics without any explanation, when a pilot's in danger, when he's temporarily safe, the g-forces he has to pull to get out of the lines of fire—loops, dives, climbs, rolls, stalls—and the bruising exultation of making it through. You pick up the nerve-jolting terror of dogfighting, too. Neither the cinematography nor the choreography ever allows the viewer to forget the gulfs of height beneath these fragile kites of canvas and wire and men frantically swearing; it's a long, long way to fall (sometimes burning) and there's so little between you and that ground coming up screaming fast, a rivet, a strut, a smear of engine oil. A blind spot. The sun in your eyes. And the controls are gone. I watched this movie on TCM, but if it were in theaters I would sit through the slog of the earthbound setup just to watch the flying scenes silver-screen-size, all that spiraling light and sky. People who enjoy rollercoasters may enjoy this movie, or at least selected portions of it. People with a phobia of flying will probably not.
What I feel the finished version of Hell's Angels proves is that Hughes could and should have had a stellar career as a special effects and action designer for other people's movies and on no account should have been allowed to produce and direct his own films. I really believe only Wellman rivaled him in this period for monumentally scaled three-dimensional action, but Wellman never got distracted by Jane Russell's underwiring—or, more pertinently to this production, by shooting and reshooting so extravagantly that for every foot of film that made it into the final cut, another two hundred and fifty feet are supposed to have been scrapped in the editing. I am not at all sorry to have seen it. It is quite possibly the most expensive piece of outsider art I have ever run into, somewhere out on its own evolutionary branch between the rest of Hollywood and its producer's id. I suspect the color tinting in night scenes was an artifact of the aborted silent shoot, but the similar employment of intertitles to translate non-English dialogue now feels decades ahead of its time. The dialogue is even swearier than your average pre-Code: I counted instances of "bloody fool," "God damn it," "to hell with," "for Christ's sake," "son of a bitch," and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch tells me I missed at least one "ass." I have no idea why the scene at the charity ball was singled out for filming in two-strip Technicolor, but since it provides our only color record of Harlow's famous platinum hair (and, Hughes being Hughes, her cleavage), I'll take it. The making of this film would have been worth it for her alone. I'm just glad the planes also lived up to their reputation. This high flying brought to you by my gutsy backers at Patreon.
I can't really blame it. William Wellman was already pushing the norms of Hollywood producing when he took nine months of Paramount's time and $2 million of their money to film the groundbreaking aerial combat scenes of Wings (1927), but Hughes' independent riposte would cost him three years and nearly $3 million and in the meantime generate a cavalcade of tsuris including but not limited to cast changes, stunt crashes, a lawsuit which it lost, a partial reshoot and total rewrite following the coming of sound, and a five-director game of musical chairs that ultimately resolved on Hughes himself with assistance from James Whale, fresh off the Broadway production of Journey's End and appalled by the script. It was like the Big Dig of pre-Code Hollywood. Production went on for so long that not only did Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930) beat its competitor to the box office by several months despite starting production two and a half years later, so did Whale's own screen version of Journey's End (1930), for which he had to travel to England and by the time he got back Hell's Angels was still going on. Out of a mix-up like that, if you're lucky you get Cleopatra (1963). If you're not lucky, you get Heaven's Gate (1980). Hughes lost neither his shirt nor his studio—and he did not lose his life even when he augured himself into the ground performing an aerobatic stunt his pilots had correctly warned him would end in a crash—but the divers hands told on the plot, which is surprisingly lackadaisical for something that starts with a duel and ends with an execution and sticks the war to end all wars in between. In theory I like the idea of a love triangle that's just a three-way bad romance, but the practice of casting Harlow as a London socialite and the equally American James Hall and Ben Lyon as a pair of brothers who enlist in the Royal Flying Corps right out of their rooms at Oxford renders the firing of original star Greta Nissen for her Norwegian accent a rather mean joke; she cannot possibly have sounded less British than Harlow asking Lyon if he would be shocked if she put on something more comfortable, although in all fairness Harlow with her incandescent dirty grin sells it. If there are only three characters of any appreciable depth in a movie, I prefer it if the characterizations of two of them do not swing wildly round the compass depending on the scene. And while it intrigues me that the film's ending is disillusioned enough to pass for the anti-Wings, I wish I did not keep worrying that the most interesting aspects of the script were inadvertent.
I have a lot of trouble telling, for example, how the film wants us to feel about Lyon's Monte Rutledge, the wastrel brother for whom the gallant, responsible Roy (Hall) is always having to cover—charming and cheerful though he may be, surely it can't approve of him funking a duel in pre-war Berlin and leaving his brother to cop a bullet in his stead, or sleeping with his brother's free-spirited beloved Helen (Harlow) and then slut-shaming her while concealing his own part in the affair, or malingering in wartime France so that other men have to take his place on the night patrol and "go west"? He has the weak character's saving grace of knowing it, but it never stops him from doing the expedient thing. Even his recruitment is an accident of bravado and peer pressure, heckled by passersby into signing his life away for a kiss from a pretty girl. By the time we reached the Western Front, I was not surprised to hear him express the sole anti-war sentiments of the picture; it got my attention, however, that the picture appeared to believe him. Monte's arguments are not just typical of pre-Code pacifism but shared by movies like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) where we are intended to agree with the characters who voice them. "What are you fighting for?" he screams at his fellow flyers, shaking with nerves and the adrenaline flashover of having just been called a coward in front of the entire mess. "Patriotism? Duty? Are you mad? Can't you see they're just words—words coined by politicians and privateers to trick you into fighting for them? . . . Yellow, am I? You're the ones that are yellow. I've got guts to say what I think. You're afraid to say it—so afraid to be called yellow, you'd rather be killed first!" That's great pre-Code complexity. Even a stopped clock can strike it right every twelve hours and even a slacker can call out the dulce et decorum lies of war. The next shot is one of my favorites, tightly theatrical and suggestive of the character drama Hughes was not interested in making, Monte slumped in his bunk illuminated by a kerosene lantern that shows his face half-hidden in his hand and leaves the rest of the darkness pressing in on all sides. (I know it's supposed to mark him out as a misfit and a disgrace, but Lyon sloping and slouching around the barracks in an old jumper instead of his maternity jacket, his jaw five o' clock shadowed and his normally patent leather hair tousled all over his forehead, honestly looks his best all movie. If he could only manage a credible English accent, he could have wandered over from the trenches of Journey's End.) The problem is that while he's damaged and sympathetic here, elsewhere the script can't decide from scene to scene whether he's likeably irresponsible, contemptibly spineless, or realistically cracking up, and while Lyon—whom I like—commits like a pro to whichever interpretation is uppermost in its thoughts, the results still play like three different drafts of one character and for all I know they may be. Harlow's Helen is just as inconsistently split. The film can't make up its mind whether her zipless hedonism should be seen as liberated or just slutty; it's wolf-whistle funny when she really does shock Monte with the line about something more comfortable and her refusal to go through even the motions of romantic love and matrimony is sort of backhandedly feminist, but the best thing I can say about the resolution of her subplot is that at least in 1930 she didn't have to die for breaking Roy's heart and confirming Monte's misogyny and absolutely nothing but Harlow's nascent star power holds her last, spitefully illusion-smashing speech together.
I think the film may have wanted to contrast the brothers with the ideals of their genre, presenting them as not just foils of one another but incomplete parts of a tragic hero. Neither is much to speak of in the singular; Roy is dutiful and idealistic in exactly the way of doomed youth in this cannon-fodder war, but Monte's more cynical realism doesn't make up for his missing backbone. Neither route leads to heroism. Is there any such thing in this war? At the last minute, their eternally mixed motives come together in just about the only scene where I felt the script rather than the spectacle carried the emotional force it was aiming for: they get the job done, but at a cost of massive irony, intermingling love and betrayal with the audience's awareness that no one who wasn't there will ever know the difference. If this was the intended theme, however, it's too drawn out and diffuse to register until very late in the game and in any case the project is let down by the acting of Hall, who I suspect would have shown to much better advantage in the silent version of the film. He's most persuasive in the silent scenes patched in from the original shoot, where his dialogue is either overdubbed or nonexistent and any stiffness in his heavy, soulful face can come under the wire of the style. Any time he has to talk, however, he reminds me of why I stay away from even amateur acting, because I have heard how utterly unbelievable a human being can sound saying something as ordinary as "Oh . . . no," and unfortunately in a two-hour movie he has to talk a lot. I can't promise another actor would have fixed the problem, but I'm just saying, Joel McCrea couldn't have hurt.
Anyway, I promised stunning action sequences and I meant it. They are not just impressive for their time; in an age of CGI, they're extraordinary. Narratively, the bombing raid over London in the first act is marred by some lemming-like anti-German silliness, but the slow overhead shot of the Zeppelin as it slides out of the deep, roiling cloud cover with a heavy thrum of engines is still resounding through the Star Wars universe, its fetishistic attention to the dial-spinning, lever-throwing mechanics of making war a silent progenitor of generations of technobabble; the scramble of an intercepting flight offers a well-matched mix of model work and aerial photography, but the crash which caps the sequence took my breath away, a titanic, baleful, crumpling conflagration that does not once look as though double exposures are involved in the suicidal dive that ignites it or the flaming collapse that just misses incinerating our downed protagonists. The dogfight in the second act is almost certainly the most realistic representation I have ever seen of air combat in World War I. I don't mean just that it's performed in real time by real planes and real pilots, many of whom were veterans of the war they were reenacting: then I could praise it for authenticity, but the word I keep falling back on is not authentic but visceral. Counting the initial bombing of a German ammo dump in a captured Gotha G.IV (the Sikorsky S-29-A, which along with three stunt men and one mechanic gave its life for the production), the full sequence lasts just over twenty minutes and it's as tight and tempered and well-orchestrated as all the talk around it is not; after warming the audience up with some shed-splintering explosions, the first grade of action begins with von Richthofen and his Flying Circus mobbing the bomber like crows with a daylight owl and really kicks into gear with the arrival of two wings of reinforcements from Roy and Monte's aerodrome. There are long shots, close-ups, hovering points of view as intimate and disembodied as the air, mid-air collisions, individual engagements, screams, flames, profanity. The line of the horizon wheels over and the clouds veer sickeningly against the sun. You pick up a sense of tactics without any explanation, when a pilot's in danger, when he's temporarily safe, the g-forces he has to pull to get out of the lines of fire—loops, dives, climbs, rolls, stalls—and the bruising exultation of making it through. You pick up the nerve-jolting terror of dogfighting, too. Neither the cinematography nor the choreography ever allows the viewer to forget the gulfs of height beneath these fragile kites of canvas and wire and men frantically swearing; it's a long, long way to fall (sometimes burning) and there's so little between you and that ground coming up screaming fast, a rivet, a strut, a smear of engine oil. A blind spot. The sun in your eyes. And the controls are gone. I watched this movie on TCM, but if it were in theaters I would sit through the slog of the earthbound setup just to watch the flying scenes silver-screen-size, all that spiraling light and sky. People who enjoy rollercoasters may enjoy this movie, or at least selected portions of it. People with a phobia of flying will probably not.
What I feel the finished version of Hell's Angels proves is that Hughes could and should have had a stellar career as a special effects and action designer for other people's movies and on no account should have been allowed to produce and direct his own films. I really believe only Wellman rivaled him in this period for monumentally scaled three-dimensional action, but Wellman never got distracted by Jane Russell's underwiring—or, more pertinently to this production, by shooting and reshooting so extravagantly that for every foot of film that made it into the final cut, another two hundred and fifty feet are supposed to have been scrapped in the editing. I am not at all sorry to have seen it. It is quite possibly the most expensive piece of outsider art I have ever run into, somewhere out on its own evolutionary branch between the rest of Hollywood and its producer's id. I suspect the color tinting in night scenes was an artifact of the aborted silent shoot, but the similar employment of intertitles to translate non-English dialogue now feels decades ahead of its time. The dialogue is even swearier than your average pre-Code: I counted instances of "bloody fool," "God damn it," "to hell with," "for Christ's sake," "son of a bitch," and
spatch tells me I missed at least one "ass." I have no idea why the scene at the charity ball was singled out for filming in two-strip Technicolor, but since it provides our only color record of Harlow's famous platinum hair (and, Hughes being Hughes, her cleavage), I'll take it. The making of this film would have been worth it for her alone. I'm just glad the planes also lived up to their reputation. This high flying brought to you by my gutsy backers at Patreon.
