Shot Near the Top of My Chart

 

Among the One-Hundred: Hell's Angels

There’s been conjecture as to cost and casualties on Hell’s Angels. Some claim four million was sunk in the negative, a most since the silent Ben-Hur, while others make it more, as in $4.5, claims also that two million was gone just on a near-completed talkless Angels that Howard Hughes scuttled in favor of sound. United Artists data says $2.8 million was the outlay, $1.6 million coming back in domestic rentals. Is truth somewhere in between? Probably so, as myths attached quick to Hell’s Angels. This was glorious Hollywood, madness Hollywood, fiscal indifference to give free-spend appearance, but seldom the reality of it. Hughes had roared into town on his own (inherited) money, was a cock of the air when aviation was a most romantic pursuit men could aspire to, him tall, dark, and obsessive, still sane enough to make projects begin and eventually conclude. He did features that clicked, are still shown at TCM, if silent and not a little strange. Universal owns the lot. They licensed Hell’s Angels to Criterion for its recent 4K release, which I might as well go ahead and call Disc of the Year. Did I mention casualties before? There were four deaths said most, some creeping it up to five. Suppose there were more that got covered up? --- that easy enough in wild-wooly H’wood of off-chart risks and reward. Stunt flyers went all but Kamikaze over jobs that paid best for a day’s (or hour) work. Nobody wanted to die in the air, but better men had, and theirs was an ennobled fraternity. Just occurs to me: Was there ever a woman stunt flyer? Surely yes … we just haven’t been introduced to her. What if a Louise Brooks lookalike posed as a pilot, bobbed hair beneath goggles, a years-long career daring death and we never knew about it. Sounds like a script idea, but who’d play it? There is after all no Louise Brooks or comparable to cast. So many tales about Hell’s Angels are tall. Things are to a point where I prefer invention if not outright fabrication.

They'd Never Let Her Look and Act This Way at Metro ... more's the pity

There were Hell’s Angels junkies that wrote to Films in Review, and often. They’d argue as to what kind of biplanes were used for dogfights. Mel Torme of singing fame was one of ultra-fans. How many boys were weaned on Hell’s Angels? I knew one during law-practice days. He was a superior court judge who kept juries waiting while he and I talked over old movies in chambers. Judge Tom Seay saw Hell’s Angels on first release and it stayed a religious experience from there on. You realize it had a color sequence, he said with expected intensity. Yes sir, your honor, I heard about that but never saw it (this the eighties after all). Forgot to ask if he also caught the spider pit in King Kong … too late now. Losing veteran picturegoers like Judge Seay was pretty much losing it all. Yes, Hell’s Angels had a color section, at least a reel, the cast said to have sweated under lights hotter than Satan shoveled. They also got Klieg eyes, which meant your eyeballs got singed by the heat. I repeat … eyeballs singed. There would have been no movie stardom worth that for me. Jean Harlow among others experienced it, Hell’s Angels also when she began putting poison in her hair to make it unnaturally blond, more laden upon a woman already doomed by adolescent scarlet fever with kidneys compromised as result. Harlow bore Indian sign as did others with early acquired health conditions. More of her to come … oh, why not now? Jean was eighteen, came from privilege, was not the ding-dong some films made her out to be, could read and all that. In fact, she wrote a book once, was good to fans, loved William Powell (don’t we all?). But Harlow also kept reckless company, was not so nice to husbands or lovers once she tired of them (Bill an exception, him nobody’s doormat). That’s the chance you took, fellows, her being Jean Harlow after all. She’d claim to the end that the screen image had nothing to do with her. To large extent, it didn’t. Whole of studio mourned, really mourned, when she died in 1937. Lots claim she was hopeless in Hell’s Angels. Not me --- I call Harlow as “Helen” fully formed and wish Harlow had stayed just the way she was here. Talk about a raw feed. She is that and loads more, primitive and gimme-gimme, all men’s dream and eventual nightmare. Many imagine they’d want something like her, but don’t go near that stove.

Attention-Grabbed by the Throat in Gotham

Hell’s Angels was the fastest ride 1930 ever saw. There had been Wings and The Big Parade before, both sedate alongside this. Hell’s Angels is kicking-door-down, brute entertainment, like King Kong and Tarzan and His Mate would be, these to exhilarate, if not unnerve a little. Movies tempered like steel, guard down, stops out. TCM had been playing Hell’s Angels High-Def, so OK, it was familiar, but this … as said, it’s 4K, and lookit, they widen ratio to 1.54 for the zep raid plus dogfights. Was 1.54 random arrived at or did theatres, at least first-run ones, run Hell’s highlights that way? No matter, it socks. 127 minutes goes by like grease spilled on hot surface (there is an intermission). We get prewar set-up in Germany, dueling right away, enlistment for brothers James Hall and Ben Lyon, then the color, then Ben seduced by Jean, and so on through pell-mell whole. Hell’s Angels all but wrung me out. Who among participants do you favor? I’ve drifted more toward Ben Lyon’s Monte. He’s selfish, a shameless fornicator, takes coward way out of all conflict, a mere boy in men’s uniform. Monte’s a lot like Hud Bannon had he been around to serve in the Great War. And he gets a terrific speech denouncing militarism and patriotic fervor that is said to have roused applause from 1930 audiences who’d long since re-thought baseless conflict that was WWI. Monte is in short a pioneering anti-hero. The talkies’ first? I say yes. Brother Roy is a simp beside him, always doing the “right” thing, a hopeless chump to Helen, who finally shrieks so, plus abusive more, when he catches her all but mounting a French officer in a smoky barroom. Movies to have drama must have their Roys, and Montes. Their back-forth leads to searing pay-off. Who wrote this? I’m told Marshall Neilan to begin with. Let’s say spine of the story was his. If that’s true, by all means lionize him instead of recap that he stayed drunk, irresponsible, unreliable, a sound-era washout. Alkies got good ideas too, sometimes great ones.

Germany's Attacking Zep Both Outside and In --- Sure Looked Real to Me!

Speaking of greatness applied to Hell’s Angels, there was also James Whale, brought on to direct dialogue, it estimated (biographer James Curtis) that Whale was ultimately responsible for sixty percent of completed Hell’s Angels. He’d not do aerial scenes of course, that was Hughes’ bailiwick. Whale instead focused on words and character. We know from later evidence that he was masterful at both. I’m almost at point of calling Hell’s Angels “A Film by James Whale.” All I hear is how mean he was to Jean Harlow, but he couldn’t have kept on being that way and gotten such a marvelous performance from her. Again, re Harlow: She would never be this fresh, unplugged, smoldering, again. How could mainstream Hollywood have stood it, let alone eventual employer MGM? Suppose Whale met her later at some industry function and maybe said, I always knew you had the stuff, Jean. Nice to think something like that maybe happened. Funny how so much movie “facts” come instead from our imaginations, not to mention that of those put to telling “truth” about a largely lying industry. Again Ben Lyon: He’s said (he claimed) to have discovered Marilyn Monroe. Was there enough of Monte in Ben to take advantage of that situation, or was he offscreen more Roy’s speed? I think Monte was the model. In fact, didn’t Jim Bacon say so in one of his indiscreet seventies paperbacks? Guys so experienced as Lyon were takers where they could be and givers where they must. Aren’t we all? Ben had Bebe, a catch for sure, but was he a Monte in tinsel clothing? Catch Ben interviewed by Kevin Brownlow about throwing Pola Negri out of the Valentino funeral for excess weeping and show-off floral arrangements. Lyon comes across as a realist and ultra-doer. I’ll bet Bebe used extra-strength rouge remover on his shirt collars. Had but guys like Ben Lyon left memoirs.

Kid on the Left in What Looks Like Goggles, Another Stood in Profile with Leathery (Flight?) Jacket

Did Hughes have Harlow? Earlier employer Hal Roach did, according to a trusted source. It’s been said HH “didn’t bother with her.” Oh, sure … in that dog kennel of a town, cathouse of an industry? High minders will say it’s of no concern, so long ago and all that, but believe me, when you watch Hell’s Angels on 4K, it's in part to hash over such indelicate things. Of course, some of us could look at a muddy dupe with same debased thoughts. I don’t admire Harlow any less whether she played ball or not, and figure she used predators better than they thought they were using her. One’s mind percolates where watching Hell’s Angels. No sooner are we off the color segment than the zep shows up, blue-tint, hand-applications (that red explosion!), scary in its authenticity (balloon “miniature” was sixty feet long). German personnel leap to deaths to reduce weight after their craft is hit, sacrifice of all to the Fatherland. Glad Monte wasn’t there and forced to jump. Speaking of scary, there are the air battles, “staged” not noticeably so, for these are real planes en masse and chasing each other as though real war was on with bonus (increased stunt pay?) for bringing down your opponent. Was courting death daily aspect of stunter life as was case in the war? Some of these men after all were combat vets. Those four/five lost could enlighten us. Ghosts aloft, Hell’s Angels unearthily effective as no other war depiction had been or would be. Did Ben Lyon offer extended explain of dogfighting he obviously did? He lived long enough (James Hall gone by 1940 after Harlow’s ’37 depart), and was interviewed, hopefully not just by Brownlow, Ben’s extended lifetime against backdrop of a Hell’s Angels cult long in place (could this have been the first cult movie?). The show stayed visible for decades after 1930 as a presumably cheap reissue, Hell’s Angels and Scarface out there (and often combined) to show what gutsy filmmaking was really all about. Stock footage saw as much service as blown-up lizards from One Million B.C. I can’t count the number of cheapies with that same truck blowing up, courtesy Hughes. To sum-up: Never mind what went before of Hell’s Angels. Criterion is the goods. Best ever, hands down, this rocketing up my Favorite List to Top 100 (more like Top 20) for what 4K, recaptured color and width-for-highlights have done for it. Plus there’s extras, unseen outtakes narrated by David Stenn, a Harlow segment with Farran Smith Nehme, her work as always terrific.