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Scott was wearing those red polka-dot pajamas. What a shock they'll give the Devil!
Tonight I was really looking forward to watching Flight Commander (1930) on TCM, because that's the title under which Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol was filed after the pre-Code film was given a high-profile remake in 1938; I figured it would be a nice reward for an evening that prominently featured an MRI. (I wear earplugs, but still find the experience excruciatingly noisy.) I got about twenty-five minutes into the picture and it dropped right out of the buffer. Couldn't even wait until midnight. Thanks ever so, TCM.
A review will have to wait until I can get hold of the complete movie (which exists on DVD, but not in the Minuteman Library Network, thanks ever so to you, too), so about all I can record is that so far the two scripts are so scene-for-scene similar that I'm actively puzzled that a remake exists at all. Entire passages of dialogue are identical or differ by some rearrangement and vocabulary. With the possible exception of some graffiti1 and the romantic backstory mentioned below, I can't see any elements so Code-uncompliant that they would have prevented the original from being re-released. Everyone drinks like it's a race between the Germans and liver failure, but that's true in the '38 version, too. So the differences come out in the performances—Neil Hamilton as Brand is younger than Basil Rathbone, tougher-mannered but more visibly fraying; he keeps a bottle on his desk and starts drinking the moment he hears four planes come back from a seven-man mission. Aerodrome gossip says that he and Courtney fell out in Paris over a girl, but the real argument is Courtney's belief that his superior's lack of judgment and/or outright incompetence is what keeps the new recruits tumbling out of the sky like burnt leaves, not the major's helpless position in the relay of orders that he can neither amend nor assume himself. As Courtney, Richard Barthelmess doesn't have Errol Flynn's careless panache, but he doesn't need to: he has hard-bitten professionalism on his side and the world-weary edge that I have come to associate with the actor. He has no expectations of his own survival, but he takes as much care of his men as he can while he's still around to do it, protecting the less experienced pilots in combat and, if they survive, trying to ease them through the inevitable shock of losing their friends, just as Courtney is implied to have lost everyone but the inseparable Scotty, here played by an incredibly young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., clean-shaven and gangling. He's the closest in type to his successor—David Niven—the joker of the squadron, absurdly debonair in the pajamas which he is wearing under his flying gear on the day he's shot down, having rolled out of bed with a hangover ten minutes before scramble. Courtney's line quoted in the subject header was exactly where TCM's streaming service cut out. I've seen this picture with different actors, so I know he's not dead, but I don't know how Barthelmess takes the discovery and I was looking forward to finding out.
I recognize that my ability to watch TCM on my computer at all is a privilege, but I still resent it. I'd feel a lot less bitter if I had access to this movie anywhere else at all.
1. Over the bar in the mess, someone has chalked "NO OBSCENE LANGUAGE." Someone else has come along and chalked out the "NO."
A review will have to wait until I can get hold of the complete movie (which exists on DVD, but not in the Minuteman Library Network, thanks ever so to you, too), so about all I can record is that so far the two scripts are so scene-for-scene similar that I'm actively puzzled that a remake exists at all. Entire passages of dialogue are identical or differ by some rearrangement and vocabulary. With the possible exception of some graffiti1 and the romantic backstory mentioned below, I can't see any elements so Code-uncompliant that they would have prevented the original from being re-released. Everyone drinks like it's a race between the Germans and liver failure, but that's true in the '38 version, too. So the differences come out in the performances—Neil Hamilton as Brand is younger than Basil Rathbone, tougher-mannered but more visibly fraying; he keeps a bottle on his desk and starts drinking the moment he hears four planes come back from a seven-man mission. Aerodrome gossip says that he and Courtney fell out in Paris over a girl, but the real argument is Courtney's belief that his superior's lack of judgment and/or outright incompetence is what keeps the new recruits tumbling out of the sky like burnt leaves, not the major's helpless position in the relay of orders that he can neither amend nor assume himself. As Courtney, Richard Barthelmess doesn't have Errol Flynn's careless panache, but he doesn't need to: he has hard-bitten professionalism on his side and the world-weary edge that I have come to associate with the actor. He has no expectations of his own survival, but he takes as much care of his men as he can while he's still around to do it, protecting the less experienced pilots in combat and, if they survive, trying to ease them through the inevitable shock of losing their friends, just as Courtney is implied to have lost everyone but the inseparable Scotty, here played by an incredibly young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., clean-shaven and gangling. He's the closest in type to his successor—David Niven—the joker of the squadron, absurdly debonair in the pajamas which he is wearing under his flying gear on the day he's shot down, having rolled out of bed with a hangover ten minutes before scramble. Courtney's line quoted in the subject header was exactly where TCM's streaming service cut out. I've seen this picture with different actors, so I know he's not dead, but I don't know how Barthelmess takes the discovery and I was looking forward to finding out.
I recognize that my ability to watch TCM on my computer at all is a privilege, but I still resent it. I'd feel a lot less bitter if I had access to this movie anywhere else at all.
1. Over the bar in the mess, someone has chalked "NO OBSCENE LANGUAGE." Someone else has come along and chalked out the "NO."
no subject
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).