Why didn't somebody tell me about this man's war?

When I said you can really fall apart in a pre-Code movie, I had not yet seen The Eagle and the Hawk (1933). I knew the film's reputation as the bleakest of the aviation pictures adapted from the works of John Monk Saunders; I did not know that would mean a brilliantly controlled, relentlessly down-driving crack-up on the part of Fredric March. It looks at first like your standard arc of disillusionment with the great lies of the Great War. It goes so much further and it hits so much harder when it lands.

Because it's a pre-Code, it wastes no time catapulting us into the plot and so our protagonists are cleverly and economically introduced under the credits with snapshots of their peacetime lives. Roughly handsome Henry Crocker (Cary Grant) is a hot-tempered foreman, brawling on a mining site; moon-faced Mike Richards (Jack Oakie) munches a deli sandwich while reading a card from one of those fortune-telling machines, "You will soon be facing great danger." Laughing over his shoulder as he turns his polo pony for another crack at the ball, Jerry Young (March) epitomizes instantly that careless, well-bred world that could not imagine its games and adventures ever ending, even in the shell-shattered skies of France—he's still laughing in the present day of the aerodrome as he extricates himself from the truss-over-teakettle wipeout of his latest training flight with Crocker, who's sore enough about his six-crash record without some rich hotshot snickering at him, "As a pilot, you're an A-1 gunner!" He's even laughing as he springs down from the giddy rush of his first reconnaissance mission with the 323rd Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, not a scratch on him and two kills already to his name. Across the tramping reaper-skeleton painted on the side of his de Havilland DH.4, the black spatter of oil looks like a baptism of blood. "Why didn't somebody tell me about this man's war?" Jerry demands jubilantly, as bright-eyed as if he's just won another polo match. Only then does he see his observer's body being unloaded from the plane, quite dead and overlooked by Jerry's self-congratulation; when he turns over the aerial film for which three men died, suddenly fumbling and tongue-tied, his hands are full of blood. It's not the subtlest of gestures on the film's part, but it is hard to argue with as the weeks pass and Jerry's name stays firmly fixed in the "Pilot" column of the daily flight roster while the names of his observers come and go in chalk-scuffs behind him. The bodies of his enemies pile up in ribbons on his chest, the bodies of his comrades in nightmares on his conscience, and he can't take either weight. "You don't drink enough," Mike says sympathetically as his friend mutters about men falling in flames, indelible pictures in the mind. Mumbled flatly into the glass he's already tilting back, Jerry disagrees: "I can't drink enough." A brief respite of R&R in London at least permits him to unburden himself to a sumptuously ermine-draped stranger (Carole Lombard) who doesn't tell him to snap out of it or pull himself together but merely offers him a glass of champagne on a park bench at midnight and a compassionate ear for all the things a flying ace isn't supposed to admit to feeling, like horror and disgust and shame at his own "shining example," but no sooner has he returned to the front looking halfway human than the meat grinder roars into action twice as unbearably as before. Jerry's so good at killing, so bad at living with having killed. Something has to give and it isn't going to be the war.

I no longer remember which of my friendlist introduced me to the multifandom vid "On the Prowl," but the general idea is an interrogation of the point at which a beautiful man's suffering becomes too painful to watch. The Eagle and the Hawk runs more or less exactly this experiment on its audience, aided by March's high-wire vulnerability and by Grant's not yet suave performance as the truculent Crocker, who specifically requests the post of observer to his old rival despite knowing full well that the Jonah-ace has lost "five men in two months." He grins like a bad penny, appearing out of the darkness as if summoned by Jerry's white-knuckled guilt: "I heard about you and your medal. I wanted to see how you did it—and how long you could keep on doing it . . . I was just wondering how long you'd go on before your nerves would go to pieces." His own attitude toward the business of war is brutal and workmanlike, even unsporting, but it insulates him effectively where Jerry's more humane sensitivity renders him increasingly a walking wound; the audience may even share a little of his desire for comeuppance, remembering what an absolute ass Jerry was during basic training. The more haunted and bitter March looks, for at least a third of the picture it looks good on him, in the Byronic way that brings out the bones. It stops looking good when he's fall-down drunk for the awarding of the Croix de Guerre, propping up the bar to give a transparently insincere pep talk to the new recruits, when he wakes Crocker with one of his battle-fatigued nightmares, repeating, in a scene as low-lit and sharply shadowed as expressionist horror, "There you are. You got him. You got him," with such hair-raising monotony that he doesn't even need to sit up glassy-eyed, sleep-talk rising to a hysterical gasp, for the audience's expression to reflect Crocker's troubled pity. His old frenemy's nerves are going to pieces and there's no satisfaction in it. I don't mean it as a cheap shot at Saunders when I say that the drinking in this film feels authentic, not dramatic; I can't count the number of characters I've seen try to drown their sorrows onscreen, but March is so unemphatically self-destructive about it that it doesn't feel like a device, more like a reflex. It doesn't work, but what else is there to do? Watching him try to hang on to his composure when grilled about the fun of killing by an innocently bloodthirsty child at a party is bad enough, but it might be worse when he sees a bird gliding over the aerodrome and all he can think to say of this traditional symbol of unfettered wild grace is "It's a wonder it hasn't got crosses or circles on its wings." No wonder Crocker's animosity alters to a grudging tenderness, coming in at the point where a graveyard spiral tightens into a screaming crash. By the end of the picture, Harry Fischbeck's camera is using the remains of March's beauty only for disturbance and pathos, the smashed still-recognizable fragments of the devil-may-care gamesman who cheered, "First time over the lines, two of them!" So blasted that his eyes are focusing, if they're focusing, by pure force of anguish, Jerry sways with a fistful of medals, voice climbing as dangerously as the loosening line of his mouth: "I got these for killing kids. They're all chunks of torn flesh and broken bones and blood. And for what?"

The Eagle and the Hawk suffered weirdly from its post-Code re-release, which added a co-directing credit for Mitchell Leisen on top of Stuart Walker but otherwise went in for subtraction: mostly of the central scene with Lombard and some details of the finale, apparently. I can't tell if the occasional raggedness elsewhere is the censor's fault or just a function of the pre-Code tendency to throw a movie at a wall and see what sticks. The ending remains shockingly hopeless and cynical, even more so than the eternal blood engine of The Dawn Patrol (1930). I'm impressed by it, but I might not want to watch it all that often, compelling though March, Grant, and a fleeting Lombard are. "Every time I knock some poor devil down burning, they buy me drinks." This contest brought to you by my shining backers at Patreon.