Favorites List --- Only Angels Have Wings

The problem of writing on titles familiar as Only Angels Have Wings is knowledge that many ahead of me did it better. Is the subject finally exhausted? There’s reams of OAHW analysis out there, increased manifold by ease of online access as opposed to waiting on film journals mostly gone now. The best Howard Hawks films seem endlessly watchable. He doesn’t waver in and out of fashion like other cult directors. That word never applied to Hawks anyway, for he was too mainstream and popular to be the object of cults. Whatever started in France during the fifties was just overseas recognition of what we'd known for years. A Hawks film stops you no matter where it's tuned in. The beginning … middle … no matter. There’s always something good coming within five minutes that you remember and want to see again. I practically avoid El Dorado on my HD hard-drive for knowing that a half-hour at least will evaporate just for scrolling down to it. The best thing to do with any Hawks film is load up, surrender, and watch the whole thing, as I recently did with an umpteenth helping of Only Angels Have Wings. Here are stair-steps of deathless moments spread barely apart. Hawks said good pictures are made up of pleasurable scenes. Years of experience showed him that highlights supplied by interesting characters paid off lots better than stories rigidly adhered to. I’d gladly swap dramatic peaks of a hundred classics to again see Walter Brennan burn his finger with the match in Rio Bravo. It takes but once to know gist of even the most brilliant movie plotting. Where is need of seeing a thing play through again once you know the outcome? Hawks would have been the wrong man to direct Charlie Chan mysteries. I like the way he seizes on fun events to be revisited where occasion permits. Cary Grant tells cracked-up pilot Thomas Mitchell that his neck’s broken in Only Angels Have Wings. We remember the exchange and so would Hawks, thirty years later doing a variation for his final film, Rio Lobo. John Wayne delivered the line for that occasion, and it had a same impact. Reusing action bumps worked better for Hawks than when comedy was encored. Rock Hudson complained of ideas run aground for 1963’s Man’s Favorite Sport and how Hawks reheated stale bread from Bringing Up Baby. The director attributed old routines not working to lack of skill on the part of 60’s players who could not measure up to vintage stars like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

The best of Only Angles Have Wings began with earlier pictures, not all of them directed by Howard Hawks. His 1939 film abounds with echoes of writer Jules Furthman’s China Seas of four years back, as well as friendly rival Victor Fleming's Red Dust from 1932, which plays like a blueprint for much of Hawks to come and supplied at least one third act crisis for OAHW. I’ve read Hawks was envious of success Fleming had with Red Dust. Furthman’s China Seas model contributed to all the shows he would write for Hawks, and I wonder if he doesn’t deserve a lot more credit for devices we call Hawksian. Surprising too that a seemingly ideal HH lead, Clark Gable, never once worked with the director. They were friends and rode motorcycles together. Maybe Hawks staying away from MGM through the remainder of the thirties and thereafter had something to do with his not intersecting with Gable other than socially, a loss to both for not having teamed. As to Angels’ Cary Grant, he is more effective for me as a Hawksian action hero than in comedies they did together. I wonder that Grant engaged so little as an authority figure and man of movement, as he commands well, is believable on planes and subs. Hawks said he based Angels incidents on real-life aviation drama he had come across during WWI. It wasn’t uncommon for he-man directors to adopt been there-done that attitude where staging action, evidence of having walked the walk, William Wellman and Raoul Walsh among others who'd claim membership in a real-life adventurer fraternity.

Howard Hawks action movies are less needful of action than any other director’s action movies. You could actually do without it altogether and still have a good show. His best scenes tend to revolve around conversation. Model effects in Only Angels Have Wings betray a director’s impatience to get past flights and crashes so he can focus on character’s reactions to same. I have actually grown fond of those toy planes. There is variety in seeing them interposed with real aircraft occasionally utilized. To Hawks’ credit, he avoids bogging down with realism we neither want nor need. I think of Only Angels Have Wings and see flight jackets with scarves, coins being flipped, and cigarettes constantly lit. Songs as always find their moment in a Hawks film, everyone participating and narrative points made as we listen. Few had accomplished this outside of musicals. My issues with Jean Arthur as leading lady have been assuaged with repeat viewings, each to his own as to what annoys. I could submit names that would have suited her OAHW part a lot better, but where is point in that? Of casting ideal, there is post-stardom Richard Barthelmess bidding for renewed status enjoyed from the late teens into earlier years of talkies. His Angels character is battered and resigned to exile, much as was this actor by a facelift noted among press and colleagues stunned by Barthelmess’ post-procedure appearance. The actor looks OK in Only Angels Have Wings for a man whose deadened expression bespeaks cosmetic surgery barely off drawing boards. Barthelmess threw a post-opening party for the Angels cast/crew (above), this a last sustained effort to get back in the game. Angel’s trailer emphasized the return of a great star. RB's disgraced pilot achieves power and not a little poignancy in a film not otherwise given to sentimentality, but it proved a one-off and no basis for a comeback the actor hoped for. He retired a few years later after modest parts in three more films, relieved for having salted enough cash to manage a dignified retirement.