This just sounds seriously beyond belief. I love it.
I keep trying to compare it to other films of its decade and failing. Technically, stylistically, it's obviously of its time, but otherwise I really keep falling back on the French New Wave.* The way it just hangs out with its characters, holding scenes longer than strictly necessary, because information (these people have a lot of problems and drink too much) is less important than atmosphere (and here's what it's like to spend time with them). I'm used to pre-Code movies not judging their characters in ways that would be compulsory a handful of years later, but The Last Flight doesn't even seem to be subverting moral conventions so much as completely not caring about them. And the diversity of the veterans' damage amazes me—I'm familiar with the traditional symptoms of shell-shock or symbolism of physical loss, but I've never seen anyone like Francis who just sleeps all the time unless woken and spaces out even then; it's gently comedic, a silent character in a crowd of fast talkers, but it's also distressing. Bill has totally realistic PTSD. Shep looks like a classic jazz-age study in flippant self-destruction, but Cary really worries about him and so do we. And nothing in the script explains Nikki and nothing needs to. It's like A-list outsider art. I'd love to know Dieterle's thoughts on the film; what he brought to it. It was his first English-language production. He had emigrated to Hollywood only the year before.
* Italian neorealism also a possibility. When I described the film to my mother, it reminded her of La Dolce Vita (1960).
Watching The Thin Man, I kept thinking that one day everybody onscreen would be dead of liver failure and probably distinctly sooner than they thought, so they'd better solve that damn case quick.
I cannot imagine drinking that many martinis in my life.
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I keep trying to compare it to other films of its decade and failing. Technically, stylistically, it's obviously of its time, but otherwise I really keep falling back on the French New Wave.* The way it just hangs out with its characters, holding scenes longer than strictly necessary, because information (these people have a lot of problems and drink too much) is less important than atmosphere (and here's what it's like to spend time with them). I'm used to pre-Code movies not judging their characters in ways that would be compulsory a handful of years later, but The Last Flight doesn't even seem to be subverting moral conventions so much as completely not caring about them. And the diversity of the veterans' damage amazes me—I'm familiar with the traditional symptoms of shell-shock or symbolism of physical loss, but I've never seen anyone like Francis who just sleeps all the time unless woken and spaces out even then; it's gently comedic, a silent character in a crowd of fast talkers, but it's also distressing. Bill has totally realistic PTSD. Shep looks like a classic jazz-age study in flippant self-destruction, but Cary really worries about him and so do we. And nothing in the script explains Nikki and nothing needs to. It's like A-list outsider art. I'd love to know Dieterle's thoughts on the film; what he brought to it. It was his first English-language production. He had emigrated to Hollywood only the year before.
* Italian neorealism also a possibility. When I described the film to my mother, it reminded her of La Dolce Vita (1960).
Watching The Thin Man, I kept thinking that one day everybody onscreen would be dead of liver failure and probably distinctly sooner than they thought, so they'd better solve that damn case quick.
I cannot imagine drinking that many martinis in my life.