It's a great movie. I've never really written about it, but it's this strange, capricious, wholly committed mix of romantic love story and platonic love story and adventure story and war story (except that now it's peacetime, but you can draw a direct line from the fatalistic flyers of The Dawn Patrol's Royal Flying Corps to the hard-drinking pilots of Geoff Carter's Barranca Airways) and some people find redemption and happiness and some people don't and a lot of it is very funny and nothing in it is taken lightly except the things that deserve to be, like death and mourning, and I've only seen it once on TCM and I liked it a lot. Jean Arthur felt she was miscast as the romantic lead and so did Hawks, apparently to the detriment of the picture in both their opinions, but I didn't know that before I saw the film and I don't think it suffers from her. You can imagine other actresses afterward, but she has good chemistry with Cary Gant. I would love for the HFA to screen a Howard Hawks retrospective. I would attend most of it.
And I like that your sympathies went out to the poor cockroach, no doubt influenced by the desperate movements of those graceful antennae, somewhat like lashes.
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It's a great movie. I've never really written about it, but it's this strange, capricious, wholly committed mix of romantic love story and platonic love story and adventure story and war story (except that now it's peacetime, but you can draw a direct line from the fatalistic flyers of The Dawn Patrol's Royal Flying Corps to the hard-drinking pilots of Geoff Carter's Barranca Airways) and some people find redemption and happiness and some people don't and a lot of it is very funny and nothing in it is taken lightly except the things that deserve to be, like death and mourning, and I've only seen it once on TCM and I liked it a lot. Jean Arthur felt she was miscast as the romantic lead and so did Hawks, apparently to the detriment of the picture in both their opinions, but I didn't know that before I saw the film and I don't think it suffers from her. You can imagine other actresses afterward, but she has good chemistry with Cary Gant. I would love for the HFA to screen a Howard Hawks retrospective. I would attend most of it.
And I like that your sympathies went out to the poor cockroach, no doubt influenced by the desperate movements of those graceful antennae, somewhat like lashes.
Hah!
(I do hope it got home all right.)