Flieger

Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 catapulted him into celebrity, and made aviators the ultimate American heroes of the late 1920s. Hollywood reflected this in a series of aviation-themed movies, most notably the first Best Picture Academy Award winner Wings, but also in the Howard Hughes extravaganza Hell's Angels and the Howard Hawks-directed Dawn Patrol. A lesser-known entry is this early talkie, simply titled "Flight".

Being of the first wave of sound pictures, Flight is a somewhat awkward production. The sound is of rather fuzzy quality, and the dialogue a little stilted. The three lead actors however, all veterans of the silent era, make the transition fairly well. They had worked together before and the rapport between them is believably strong. Ralph Graves (who also wrote the screenplay) is easily the least interesting of them, but he still has an easygoing charm and realism to him, and reminds me a little of Fred MacMurray. I particularly like his sarcastic "hooray" when he is assigned as a mechanic. Jack Holt makes a loveably gruff sergeant and fatherly mentor to Graves, and he is responsible for building up the movie's atmosphere of rough-edged friendliness. Lila Lee was a popular star in the silents, and her voice and manner adapt well to the new format. Like many leading ladies of this period however she would not maintain her success past a certain age and would soon be retiring to private life.

The director is a youthful Frank Capra, making his talkie debut. Capra's silents were typically marked with an obvious desire to make his mark with lots of attention-grabbing set-ups. By this point he is starting to settle down a bit and a more serious style is beginning to emerge. The opening shot, where the commentator's head looms over half the screen and the later cantina scene where various faces mill about in the foreground betray a love of a certain look, but also point towards a technique Capra would later perfect, that is of having the camera amid the action as if it was a person on the set. Capra also uses appropriate distances for dialogue scenes, as oppose to many early sound features where the actors were placed too far back while they were talking, giving an unnatural effect. There are however a few clunky moments; a quick dolly-in on a bucket is reminiscent of Capra's overdone slapstick comedies. His biggest weak point however seems to be action, and it appears that the fighting scenes in Flight were largely rescued in the editing suite.

And it appears that, in spite of the title, the emphasis on flying in this movie isn't as pronounced as it could be. Wings, Hell's Angels and Dawn Patrol all strove to give us viewers a taste of the thrill of being airborne. Here however Capra alternates between rather bland stock-footage like shots of planes in flight and reaction shots of the men on board. But you see Flight is more about the camaraderie and self-sacrifice of military life. The plot may be a rather predictable love triangle between friends affair, and a little more pizazz in the action scenes might have given more of a sense of danger to their circumstances, but as it is this is a worthy attempt which points towards the more technically modest yet dramatically powerful movies of 1930s Hollywood.

Frank Capra takes to the air in this rip off of William Wellman's silent Wings (27) but it never gets off the ground. Capra seems ill equipped to deal with aviation the way WW 1 pilot Wellman is and it shows early on.

Footballer Lefty Phelps makes headlines when he runs the wrong way (ala Roy "Wrong Way" Rigel's Rose Bowl gaffe) in the big game. Shamed beyond belief he joins the Marines after meeting the admirable Panama Williams who offers sympathy and advice. Phelps ends up training to be a pilot under Williams command but he washes out. He stays on in a non-pilot capacity and begins to romance Panama's desire Nurse Murray. Friction ensues between the two but there's a rebellion to fight in Central America and this enables Lefty to redeem himself.

Flight is at a disadvantage from the start due to progress-sound. 29 was a transitional year in sound and it hampers the action and performances. Because cameras were so noisy they had to be sound proofed, restricting movement. Actors were untested in voice and nuance when it came to sound and Capra regular Ralph Graves as Lefty sulking and lumbering about comes up short in both. Tim Holt's father fares far better and Lilla Lee sporting eye lashes as wide as the wings on Von Richthofen's Fokker is more Boop than Bara.

Capra's mise en scene and editing are pedestrian with actors poorly posed (once again to accommodate the microphone) and reacting foolishly to off screen action. There are some decent air acrobatics and a striking approach shot to an enemy fortress but special effects are glaringly poor in spots and overall it remains inferior in every aspect to Wings and thus reaffirms that Silents are golden, especially when its accompanied by a rousing pipe organ score.

Frank Capra's first full sound film doesn't have sound anymore, so looking at his second sound film, Flight, shows a technician doing everything he can to take advantage of the new sound while filming a lot outside, challenging himself by pushing against the limits of the contemporaneous technology, and yet it's all in service to a story so thin spread out over one hundred and ten minutes that nothing really connects. If this had come in at a more reasonable 80 minutes instead of 110, I think it could have worked a lot better, however at its extended runtime, it's just much more boring than it should have been.

Lefty Phelps (Ralph Graves) has to live down an embarrassing moment in his college football career when he got mixed up and ran the ball the wrong way down the field to lose the game, an event witnessed by Marine Corps pilot Panama Williams (Jack Holt) who encourages him to join the Marines to gain some purpose in life. The whole subplot of Lefty living down the reputation is kind of odd, especially since news of it only spreads amongst the recruits because he keeps a clipping of the event on him at all times, a clipping that falls out of his pocket and gets picked up by someone who makes fun of him because of the reminder. It's also supposed to feed into this idea at the core of Lefty as a character that he's afraid of trying again, limited by a fear that makes him screw up in similar ways, like when he can't get his aircraft to lift off the ground at his graduation test.

The actual dramatic meat of the film ends up being a little love triangle between Lefty, Panama, and the nurse Elinor (Lila Lee). Panama is really consumed with her though she is only really polite in return. She becomes enamored of the young, more handsome Lefty, but Lefty is too loyal to Panama for helping him out of his funk and bringing him along on the later stage mission to Nicaragua as his mechanic to go selfish regarding his own desires towards Elinor.

And that's kind of it. It's a very simple love triangle that takes a while to develop over the film, doesn't have a whole lot of dimension to it, but is earnestly told with a couple of nice little mechanical twists to it (like Panama getting Lefty as his mechanic). For a short melodrama it might have been enough, but this is a nearly two hour film.

The final bit is dominated by this sudden, underdeveloped need for the Marines to use airplanes against bandits in Nicaragua against a bandit named Lobo (Jimmy De La Cruze). It's handled with some quick dialogue that he's attacked some Americans there, the actual battle is a technically competent execution of capturing action in flight while the actual stakes are thin and hardly ever explained in anything other than the broadest of detail. There's a bit where Lefty ends up behind enemy lines that very closely mirrors the similar third act mechanics of Submarine with the slight benefit of Panama sacrificing one other soldier other than Lefty than a submarine full of them, combined with the fact that we know that Lefty is the only one left alive from the crash (something Panama doesn't know). The pique is, of course, sourced from the love triangle dynamics, and it sort of works in this melodramatic context, but only sort of.

The sound design, since its so early in the sound era and fascinates me, is this curious mixture of experiments, some that work others that don't, of trying to make a soundscape pleasing to the audience. On the one hand, the opening football game has a surprising uniformity to the background, possibly executed by capturing a similar roar of cheers across all of the shots (it really does feel like this is still the moment when sound mixing hadn't been applied to film soundtracks yet). There is also this tendency to drop out all sound in between lines of dialogue on scenes filmed outside, so we get the ambiance of the field when someone says something, all sound drops out for a second, and then someone else speaks and that ambiance comes back. It's kind of weird, but Capra and his sound team was trying to make this whole sound thing work, at least.

So, I'd probably say that Submarine is the better of the two Howard Hawks-like films that Capra had made up to this point. Hawks made them better because he had a stronger sense of these types of characters and had a more interesting way to portray these women as strong and belonging in the world instead of waifishly sitting around while things happen around her. For a better look at airmen of the time, I'd recommend Hawks' version of The Dawn Patrol, but he was juggling these kinds of love triangles even in stuff like Tiger Shark.

Anyway, it was okay. Its story is fine, just not very meaty, and the spectacle is pretty good, if unsupported by much narrative. It's a middling little adventure and melodrama that has understandably been largely forgotten by everyone save Capra completists.

Flight (1929)

** (out of 4)

Frank Capra directed this early talkie about two buddies (Jack Holt, Ralph Graves) in the Navy Air Corps who fall in love with the same woman (Lila Lee). This film runs nearly two hours and one of those hours are brilliant but it's spread across the entire running time. The flight and war sequences are simply brilliant with a lot of realistic action and some breathtaking footage of the planes in the air. Had Capra only shown that stuff then this could have been another masterpiece from the director but sadly we get a stupid love story to drag everything down. Jack Holt is brilliant in his role adding a lot of humor to the part but Graves, who co-wrote the story, doesn't fair as well. Lila Lee is cute in her part but she's certainly not the greatest actress out there.

I recently saw this on Turner Classics. I had never seen this film from the early days of talking pictures before. Adding to its historic value is that it's directed by legendary Frank Capra from early in his career. Actor Ralph Graves who plays Lefty Phillips wrote the story, using two unrelated actual current events of the day to bookend his story; a wrong-way run in the Rose Bowl and a rogue general in Nicaragua. The Phillips character is based on Roy 'Wrong Way' Riegels who played for Cal-Berkeley against Georgia Tech in the 1929 Rose Bowl. He picked up a fumble, was spun around and ran 65 yards the wrong way before being stopped short of the opponent's goal. Lefty is distraught by the humiliation and goes on to join the Marines Navy Air Corps. Riegels would later join the Army Air Corps in WWII so it's kind of like art imitating life and then life imitating art. Jack Holt is Sgt. Panama Williams who trains the pilots. Lila Lee is nurse Elinor Murray, the love interest of both Panama and Lefty. Panama, Lefty and Elinor are all sent to Nicaragua where a rogue general and his guerrilla army have killed US Marines stationed there. In reality US Marines were in Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933. Small individual armies roamed the country and the US government was instituting a unified national guard and set up Anastasio Somoza Garcia to run it. General Augusto César Sandino was a guerrilla leader who's forces fought against the US Marines for five years. In this ficitonalized account of that conflict, Sandino is a character named Lobo played by Jimmy de la Cruze. Elmer Dyer who shot the aerial scenes for such Films as Hell's Angels, Lost Horizon, The Dawn Patrol and Air Force is the principal Ariel photographer on this film and Joe Novak and Joseph Walker are cinematographers. Howard J. Green wrote the screenplay from Graves' original story with additional dialogue from director Capra. Holt had the most successful and long- lived film career of the three lead actors. An established silent film star, he smoothly made the transition to sound films and had a long career in b-westerns and crime movies. Graves was a silent film actor who's continued success was limited to the 1930's. He made a couple films in the 40's in minor roles and then his career was over. Lee was at the peak of her career here having made 11 films in 1928, 9 in 1929 and 6 in 1930 before her career began to taper off. She was a promising silent film actor who never lived up to the expectations the studio had for her after making the transition from silents to sound. This isn't a great film. It's kind of silly and awkward at times but it's well done and fun to see a Capra film just seven years into his directorial career and the film has it's early sound and early aviation historic value. It's worth a look. I would give it a 6.5 out of 10.