Still digesting. The 1930 version definitely wins for me, but I am easily biased by order of viewing (my brain is prone to decide that whatever I saw first is HOW IT SHOULD BE and any change is bad; I recognize that this is an autistic rather than an aesthetic standpoint). And Rathbone is, of course, marvellous.
It feels like there's a lot more oxygen in the 1938 film; artistic choices aside, the technological shifts mean people can move more, the camera can move around within a scene, actors can play much more quietly and still be heard, so there's a lot more room for tonal contrast within performances, I think. The lighter moments can be lighter.
I don't know if (had I seen it first) I'd have found that made it more devastating, overall, but there's a lot of power in the sheer oxygen-less relentlessness of the Hawks version, including the constraints it's working within (the very confined sets and lack of movement within them); it's a meatgrinder and it doesn't ever let up.
I definitely prefer Barthelmess's Courtney to Flynn's, and think I would even without my biases re: the actors. He's already being ground down by his responsibility towards the kids in A-Flight at a point where Flynn is still dashing and careless; being put in command is a new kind of trauma, but the process of psychological destruction is not new.
He also handles the kids quite differently from Flynn (both in terms of how he plays it and how it's scripted at certain points), though I don't yet know how to describe the difference; it's not that one is gentler than the other, but they're manifesting that gentleness and care in very different ways.
(One of the two scenes I mentioned is the scene between Courtney and Donny.)
He also blows Flynn out of the water in terms of acting power at various points, notably his reaction to finding that Scott's alive (Flynn tries his best, but Barthelmess -- I did not know he could do that with his face and it completely destroys me).
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It feels like there's a lot more oxygen in the 1938 film; artistic choices aside, the technological shifts mean people can move more, the camera can move around within a scene, actors can play much more quietly and still be heard, so there's a lot more room for tonal contrast within performances, I think. The lighter moments can be lighter.
I don't know if (had I seen it first) I'd have found that made it more devastating, overall, but there's a lot of power in the sheer oxygen-less relentlessness of the Hawks version, including the constraints it's working within (the very confined sets and lack of movement within them); it's a meatgrinder and it doesn't ever let up.
I definitely prefer Barthelmess's Courtney to Flynn's, and think I would even without my biases re: the actors. He's already being ground down by his responsibility towards the kids in A-Flight at a point where Flynn is still dashing and careless; being put in command is a new kind of trauma, but the process of psychological destruction is not new.
He also handles the kids quite differently from Flynn (both in terms of how he plays it and how it's scripted at certain points), though I don't yet know how to describe the difference; it's not that one is gentler than the other, but they're manifesting that gentleness and care in very different ways.
(One of the two scenes I mentioned is the scene between Courtney and Donny.)
He also blows Flynn out of the water in terms of acting power at various points, notably his reaction to finding that Scott's alive (Flynn tries his best, but Barthelmess -- I did not know he could do that with his face and it completely destroys me).