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I'll send you a photograph of my poetry
I just finished watching The Last Flight (1931). It's a pre-Code movie, directed by William Dieterle from a script by John Monk Saunders, whose novel Single Lady provided the source material; I rented it from the library mostly because it starred Richard Barthelmess. From e-mail to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving: "Oh, man. I have to get this down for Patreon. That is possibly the single weirdest film I've seen about World War I."
Remember when I said that if the protagonists of The Dawn Patrol (1938) survived, they'd fit right in with Hemingway's lost generation? Meet the cast of The Last Flight, American ex-servicemen drinking away their days in Paris in 1919. All of them were flyers in the war, all of them invalided out with visible and invisible injuries; their doctors have written them off as "spent bullets . . . like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement . . . useless." They never talk about going home. Shep Lambert (David Manners1) has an elegant clownish face and wears dark glasses to hide the nervous twitch in one eye; it goes away if he's drunk enough, so he makes sure he always is. Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) burned his hands to the bone bringing them both down safely in a flaming plane; less outgoing than his friend, he carries himself with a wary defensiveness, preemptively cold-shouldering pity, mockery, gratitude. Their old comrades are boisterous, folksy Bill (Johnny Mack Brown) and sleepy-eyed Francis (Elliott Nugent), the sharpshooter of the squadron formerly known as "Sudden Death." When they discover a slender, spacey girl (Helen Chandler) standing at the bar of Claridge's with a stranger's false teeth clasped gravely in a champagne glass between her hands, they recognize her as one of their disconnected own: "Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne. Boys, she's going to be a lot of trouble!" Last and least welcome, Frink (Walter Byron) is the sixth wheel of the group, a pushy journalist with a creeper's manners and a moustache like the villain in a melodrama—but so long as he behaves himself, nobody cares enough about him to throw him out. And then, once the script has assembled all of these intriguing characters in the same city, almost nothing happens.
The film is nearly plotless. There's a flurry of activity near the end as several characters self-destruct in linked succession, but few of these interactions feel inevitably driven so much as plausibly stupid. The opening and closing scenes suffer from the need to say something important about the war experience and mostly just come off as sententious. In between, however, The Last Flight reproduces with startling fidelity the experience of spending a lost weekend with five very interesting, very damaged, very drunk people who have no intention of sobering up any time soon. They talk in banter, in-jokes and non sequiturs, ticcing a funny line around the conversation like the hiccups. Absurdism is a competitive sport. No one has any attention span. Someone hears about a fight and everyone rushes out into the hall to see it; someone wants to get away to Lisbon and everyone else piles into the train; a hotel elevator turns into a flight simulator with two different pilots at the controls. The script is pre-Code, so there's a running joke of increasingly outlandish euphemisms for excusing oneself for the bathroom: "He went off to sharpen his skates . . . shave a horse . . . tame an alligator . . . take a Chinese singing lesson."2 Just the quantities of alcohol drunk by all characters at all times would have disqualified it in the days of the Production Code. After the seven-minute mark, I don't think there's anyone onscreen who's sober. Sometimes they're adorable, sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes you just want to stuff them all in a drawer and tell them to shut up. In short, they can be exactly as exhausting and vulnerable as real drunk people, and the film doesn't try to corral them into a three-act drama: they simply appear to exist in a narrative as unstructured and impulsive as their deliberately aimless lives. Even for pre-Code cinema, this is a strikingly modern approach—I expect to find it in the French New Wave, not 1930's Hollywood. The recurring mottos of the story are "Who cares?" and "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
And the damage is real, even more so than I expected from other films of the era.3 Francis sets his pocket watch to wake him at regular intervals because otherwise he drifts away into a permanent narcoleptic daze; he says little because he slurs even when more or less sober. Affable Shep is scarily disoriented, forgetting not just days of the week, but calendar dates and cities—"I kind of lose track of things," he apologizes airily, but he was surprised to hear it was June. Bill looks at first like the healthy exception, energetic and hearty as the college football halfback he was before the war, but his impulse control is shot and he's always a shade too loud, too brawling, too eager to prove his prowess. Self-conscious as he is, easily humiliated by his inability to perform simple social tasks with his scarred and stiffened hands, Cary might actually be the most functional of the group, although he too displays a fatal carelessness toward himself. Nikki is unlike any female character I have seen in a long time, if ever. She has a distracted faun's face and no conversational filters; she paints her toenails because it "seemed like a good idea at the time" and peers nearsightedly, too unselfconsciously for affectation, through an antique lorgnette. She runs back to change her shoes before a trip "on account of I can walk faster in red shoes." Her bathtub is full of lily pads and turtles. I can't imagine her in a recent film; the gravitational pull of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be too strong. I can't imagine anything less pixie-like than Chandler's sideways, abstracted, curiously self-contained performance. We never learn any more of Nikki's history than her estranged family's wealth and a few disjointed anecdotes of her childhood ("And when I got home, my toes were spoiled"), but she's blown a fuse somewhere just as much as the boys around her; it is impossible to tell her degree of sobriety or inebriation because it makes no difference to whether she will track a conversation or step over it entirely. She's capable of linear interaction—when Shep cautions her that "Cary likes to be alone. He's as brittle as a breadstick. One silly crack from you and he might break up in sections," she responds with immediate decisiveness, "Well, then I don't think he should be left alone." More often she communicates in bright, drifting fragments like "I'll take vanilla" or "So now I don't let anyone kiss me—hard." And yet to describe her as flighty or ditzy or, God forbid, quirky seems existentially wrong. She is the grounding center of the ex-airmen's lives; she's in an eccentric orbit of her own. If she brought any of this essential strangeness to the role of Mina in the 1931 Dracula, I'm going to enjoy that film much more than I expected.
What else do you want to know? The opening credits are militarily stylized, changing titles with each earth-shaking blast of a field gun. The battle sequences in the first few minutes of the film look like a mix of historical footage and excerpts from other WWI pictures—I'm pretty sure I recognized a bombing from The Dawn Patrol. Everyone seemed so declamatory in the early hospital scenes that it took me at least one round of drunken surrealism to warm up to the characters, so give it time; not all of the dialogue is off-kilter gold or at least molybdenum. Some of it is very funny. The very last lines are among the most emotionally pitch-perfect endings I know. Internet research indicates that the film was a critical hit and a commercial flop; it was a passion project of Barthelmess' and I hope he would feel rewarded to know that his efforts created, if not a classic, then at least a cult film. It is weirder than The Sun Also Rises (1926) and way the hell better than The Lost Squadron (1932). This delightful experience brought to you by my helpful backers at Patreon.
1. I'll see him on Saturday as Jonathan Harker in Dracula (1931), but I noticed him last year as the star of Crooner (1932), a fictionalized history of the megaphone crooner craze as a boom-and-bust fame story with fantastically racy jokes. My personal favorite, which wouldn't have flown a few years later: to convey the extraordinary and unprecedented sex appeal of the protagonist's singing style, the camera pans across a nightclub to the honey-melting croon of "Three's a Crowd" and we see, table by table, all the women looking dreamy-eyed and excited, all the men looking resentful and unimpressed, until we reach the dreamy-eyed young man who gushes, "I think he's superb," and the very butch woman next to him who says unimpressedly, "He's lousy."
2. Like, we can argue about the degree to which toilet humor in a movie is a good thing, but I was still surprised at an eighty-four-year-old film containing a scene in which a character is incredibly relieved to discover that the drunk next to him only poured a glass of beer down his leg.
3. I will never pass up an opportunity to recommend William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), where the protagonist gets out of the army with a morphine habit and the film condemns the institutions that smugly punish him for it. I will have to see Barthelmess sometime in one of his silent starring roles, because based on his pre-Code work and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), my current image of him is the go-to guy for fucked-up disillusion.
nineweaving: "Oh, man. I have to get this down for Patreon. That is possibly the single weirdest film I've seen about World War I."Remember when I said that if the protagonists of The Dawn Patrol (1938) survived, they'd fit right in with Hemingway's lost generation? Meet the cast of The Last Flight, American ex-servicemen drinking away their days in Paris in 1919. All of them were flyers in the war, all of them invalided out with visible and invisible injuries; their doctors have written them off as "spent bullets . . . like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement . . . useless." They never talk about going home. Shep Lambert (David Manners1) has an elegant clownish face and wears dark glasses to hide the nervous twitch in one eye; it goes away if he's drunk enough, so he makes sure he always is. Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) burned his hands to the bone bringing them both down safely in a flaming plane; less outgoing than his friend, he carries himself with a wary defensiveness, preemptively cold-shouldering pity, mockery, gratitude. Their old comrades are boisterous, folksy Bill (Johnny Mack Brown) and sleepy-eyed Francis (Elliott Nugent), the sharpshooter of the squadron formerly known as "Sudden Death." When they discover a slender, spacey girl (Helen Chandler) standing at the bar of Claridge's with a stranger's false teeth clasped gravely in a champagne glass between her hands, they recognize her as one of their disconnected own: "Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne. Boys, she's going to be a lot of trouble!" Last and least welcome, Frink (Walter Byron) is the sixth wheel of the group, a pushy journalist with a creeper's manners and a moustache like the villain in a melodrama—but so long as he behaves himself, nobody cares enough about him to throw him out. And then, once the script has assembled all of these intriguing characters in the same city, almost nothing happens.
The film is nearly plotless. There's a flurry of activity near the end as several characters self-destruct in linked succession, but few of these interactions feel inevitably driven so much as plausibly stupid. The opening and closing scenes suffer from the need to say something important about the war experience and mostly just come off as sententious. In between, however, The Last Flight reproduces with startling fidelity the experience of spending a lost weekend with five very interesting, very damaged, very drunk people who have no intention of sobering up any time soon. They talk in banter, in-jokes and non sequiturs, ticcing a funny line around the conversation like the hiccups. Absurdism is a competitive sport. No one has any attention span. Someone hears about a fight and everyone rushes out into the hall to see it; someone wants to get away to Lisbon and everyone else piles into the train; a hotel elevator turns into a flight simulator with two different pilots at the controls. The script is pre-Code, so there's a running joke of increasingly outlandish euphemisms for excusing oneself for the bathroom: "He went off to sharpen his skates . . . shave a horse . . . tame an alligator . . . take a Chinese singing lesson."2 Just the quantities of alcohol drunk by all characters at all times would have disqualified it in the days of the Production Code. After the seven-minute mark, I don't think there's anyone onscreen who's sober. Sometimes they're adorable, sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes you just want to stuff them all in a drawer and tell them to shut up. In short, they can be exactly as exhausting and vulnerable as real drunk people, and the film doesn't try to corral them into a three-act drama: they simply appear to exist in a narrative as unstructured and impulsive as their deliberately aimless lives. Even for pre-Code cinema, this is a strikingly modern approach—I expect to find it in the French New Wave, not 1930's Hollywood. The recurring mottos of the story are "Who cares?" and "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
And the damage is real, even more so than I expected from other films of the era.3 Francis sets his pocket watch to wake him at regular intervals because otherwise he drifts away into a permanent narcoleptic daze; he says little because he slurs even when more or less sober. Affable Shep is scarily disoriented, forgetting not just days of the week, but calendar dates and cities—"I kind of lose track of things," he apologizes airily, but he was surprised to hear it was June. Bill looks at first like the healthy exception, energetic and hearty as the college football halfback he was before the war, but his impulse control is shot and he's always a shade too loud, too brawling, too eager to prove his prowess. Self-conscious as he is, easily humiliated by his inability to perform simple social tasks with his scarred and stiffened hands, Cary might actually be the most functional of the group, although he too displays a fatal carelessness toward himself. Nikki is unlike any female character I have seen in a long time, if ever. She has a distracted faun's face and no conversational filters; she paints her toenails because it "seemed like a good idea at the time" and peers nearsightedly, too unselfconsciously for affectation, through an antique lorgnette. She runs back to change her shoes before a trip "on account of I can walk faster in red shoes." Her bathtub is full of lily pads and turtles. I can't imagine her in a recent film; the gravitational pull of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be too strong. I can't imagine anything less pixie-like than Chandler's sideways, abstracted, curiously self-contained performance. We never learn any more of Nikki's history than her estranged family's wealth and a few disjointed anecdotes of her childhood ("And when I got home, my toes were spoiled"), but she's blown a fuse somewhere just as much as the boys around her; it is impossible to tell her degree of sobriety or inebriation because it makes no difference to whether she will track a conversation or step over it entirely. She's capable of linear interaction—when Shep cautions her that "Cary likes to be alone. He's as brittle as a breadstick. One silly crack from you and he might break up in sections," she responds with immediate decisiveness, "Well, then I don't think he should be left alone." More often she communicates in bright, drifting fragments like "I'll take vanilla" or "So now I don't let anyone kiss me—hard." And yet to describe her as flighty or ditzy or, God forbid, quirky seems existentially wrong. She is the grounding center of the ex-airmen's lives; she's in an eccentric orbit of her own. If she brought any of this essential strangeness to the role of Mina in the 1931 Dracula, I'm going to enjoy that film much more than I expected.
What else do you want to know? The opening credits are militarily stylized, changing titles with each earth-shaking blast of a field gun. The battle sequences in the first few minutes of the film look like a mix of historical footage and excerpts from other WWI pictures—I'm pretty sure I recognized a bombing from The Dawn Patrol. Everyone seemed so declamatory in the early hospital scenes that it took me at least one round of drunken surrealism to warm up to the characters, so give it time; not all of the dialogue is off-kilter gold or at least molybdenum. Some of it is very funny. The very last lines are among the most emotionally pitch-perfect endings I know. Internet research indicates that the film was a critical hit and a commercial flop; it was a passion project of Barthelmess' and I hope he would feel rewarded to know that his efforts created, if not a classic, then at least a cult film. It is weirder than The Sun Also Rises (1926) and way the hell better than The Lost Squadron (1932). This delightful experience brought to you by my helpful backers at Patreon.
1. I'll see him on Saturday as Jonathan Harker in Dracula (1931), but I noticed him last year as the star of Crooner (1932), a fictionalized history of the megaphone crooner craze as a boom-and-bust fame story with fantastically racy jokes. My personal favorite, which wouldn't have flown a few years later: to convey the extraordinary and unprecedented sex appeal of the protagonist's singing style, the camera pans across a nightclub to the honey-melting croon of "Three's a Crowd" and we see, table by table, all the women looking dreamy-eyed and excited, all the men looking resentful and unimpressed, until we reach the dreamy-eyed young man who gushes, "I think he's superb," and the very butch woman next to him who says unimpressedly, "He's lousy."
2. Like, we can argue about the degree to which toilet humor in a movie is a good thing, but I was still surprised at an eighty-four-year-old film containing a scene in which a character is incredibly relieved to discover that the drunk next to him only poured a glass of beer down his leg.
3. I will never pass up an opportunity to recommend William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), where the protagonist gets out of the army with a morphine habit and the film condemns the institutions that smugly punish him for it. I will have to see Barthelmess sometime in one of his silent starring roles, because based on his pre-Code work and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), my current image of him is the go-to guy for fucked-up disillusion.
no subject
That's a very good way of describing it.
I think the only films by David Manners I've seen are Dracula, The Mummy, and The Black Cat, and he plays basically the same clueless romantic lead in all of them.
My God, I'd forgotten he was in The Mummy. I only ever remember Boris Karloff.
You will really enjoy Crooner if you can find it. It's the earliest movie I've seen where success goes disastrously to a pop star's head; it's all about the way technology changes the face of pop culture. Manners plays Ted, the amiable saxophone-playing bandleader of a college-buddy jazz band—"Teddy Taylor & His Collegians"—who gets thrust out in front of the audience one night when the actual lead singer turns up too hungover to perform. He's no Caruso, but he can carry a tune; what he can't do is be heard over the music until a helpful drunk sticks a megaphone in his hand, at which point Ted's pleasant but unexceptional voice is transformed into pure amplified S.A. and the ladies go wild. Overnight, crooning becomes the new sensation. The straight female population of New York City beats a path to the Golden Slipper, then to their radio sets when the band makes the jump to the airwaves. Bedroom sets fly off the shelves. The fan mail pours in faster than anyone at the station can read it. And in the meantime Ted is turning into the classic fame monster, discarding his old friends, affecting a British accent (complete with French malaprops), even faking a concert-canceling throat ailment in order to shack up with a glamorous socialite. Manners is terrific throughout, sympathetic in the early scenes when he's just one more struggling musician, hilariously willing to turn the pretentiousness up to eleven as the grade-A buffoon Ted's inflated ego turns him into. The ending is slightly unconvincing, mostly because it isn't as cynical as the rest of the picture, but Manners sells it. I didn't realize he was in The Last Flight when I rented it, but he was definitely a contributing factor to my enjoyment. He co-stars with Barbara Stanwyck in The Miracle Woman (1931), so I feel I should check that out.
(especially compared to Lupita Tovar in the Spanish-language version)
I really need to see that!
Dwight Frye's Renfield is probably my favorite thing about it.
I've heard nothing but good things about him.