Flieger

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.

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 made three films with the same two actors, Jack Holt and Ralph Graves, probably in an effort to establish the male buddy film. It would take James Cagney and Pat O'Brien to get that genre off the ground. Flight is the second of those three Graves/Holt films and the first one in sound.

It also has the same kind of roughhouse humor that would characterize the work of John Ford. In fact if you didn't know this was an early Capra film, you'd swear Ford did it.

Flight is certainly a film from the headlines of the day. It begins with college football hero Ralph Graves making a spectacular run in the Rose Bowl, the wrong way. Capra made no secret of it, he was at the Rose Bowl that year with Harry Cohn and saw Roy Rieggles playing for USC get turned around in eluding tacklers and made a spectacular run the wrong way and scored the margin of victory for Georgia Tech. The poor man never lived it down.

In fact Graves decides the Marine Corps is the place for blessed anonymity and he gets involved with aviation under the tutelage of Jack Holt. But the two of them have a falling out over nurse Lila Lees. Later on they see action in Nicaragua where the USA was maintaining a presence in hunting down those original Sandinistas.

The Marine aviators rescue a company of Marines in a Dienbienphu like situation with the Sandinistas. The battle scenes were very well staged.

Flight is not a typical Frank Capra film because Frank Capra had not found his style and type of story. Still it's a well made action film for the time.

Frank Capra made a trilogy of action dramas starring Ralph Graves and Jack Holt (Tim Holt's father) as rivals in some branch of the military service. Holt always played the cautious older man who followed regulations, Graves his impetuous younger rival. A woman always came between them. "Dirigible" is probably the best of the three, although "Submarine" (a silent film) and "Flight" are excellent too.

The only flaw in "Flight" is that it's a little too similar to the better-known "Wings" and "Tell It to the Marines", both of which were bigger box-office hits.

The opening scene in 'Flight' is based on a real-life event that had made headlines a few months earlier. In the Rose Bowl football match on New Year's Day, 1929, a college football player named Roy Riegels carried the ball 64-1/2 yards the wrong way, very nearly scoring an own goal when a teammate finally stopped him on the one-yard line. (The rival team ran interference for him against his own side!) A news photo of this event received nationwide distribution, and Riegels became a laughingstock. (Actually, when I saw 'Flight', all I knew about the Riegels incident was the famous Rose Bowl photograph. I looked up all the specifics before I posted this review. Did you really think I've got all this information memorised?)

"Flight" uses this true incident to begin its fictional story. Lefty Phelps (Ralph Graves) isn't noticeably left-handed, but he's a promising college athlete who's all set to triumph in the big game. Phelps runs the wrong way, scoring the winning touchdown for the wrong team. A photo of Phelps achieving this error gets national distribution, and Phelps becomes the butt of jokes. (We see a close-up of the Riegels photo - a well-known image in 1929 - substituting as a photo of Ralph Graves.) Phelps decides that he's ruined for life, but a friendly recruiting agent suggests that he can make a clean start by enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps. Phelps decides to become a pilot, as that's the most glamorous job in the military.

There's a very funny scene when Phelps completes his first training flight. I'm really surprised that this gag sequence (dealing with nausea and vomiting) made it into the movie. Ralph Graves steps out of the plane with one hand over his mouth, and we can tell by the look on his face that he's going to be sick. Graves looks round desperately, and then we see an immense close-up of a bucket at the far end of the runway. Graves runs all the way to the bucket with one hand over his mouth and the other hand over his gut. Will he make it in time? The pay-off is hilarious.

During his training, Phelps becomes attracted to an Army nurse (played by Lila Lee) and he runs afoul of topkick Sergeant Williams (Jack Holt). Williams thinks Phelps is paying too much attention to girls, and not enough attention to his flight training. As soon as Phelps completes his pilot training, the United States Marines invade Nicaragua (wot, again?), and off we go to Central America. There's a slam-bang action climax. Lila Lee was a very pretty actress, unfairly forgotten today. (She was also the mother of James Kirkwood Junior, who wrote "A Chorus Line".) "Flight" and "The Unholy Three" are the best examples of her talents and beauty. I'll rate 'Flight' 10 out of 10; a splendid example of early Capra.

The plot is certainly familiar from many other movies, notably "Tell it to the Marines". The old timer versus the cheeky new recruit. And of course the girl that the sergeant wants is actually in love with the recruit, who feels rotten about it because the sergeant has been so nice to him. But the characters are interesting, particularly Jack Holt's,the camaraderie is nice to watch and there is plenty of action, flying scenes and battle scenes,fascinating shots of old time airplanes, all of which make this a fun movie to watch, which after all is the important thing in a movie of this type.Very pleasant entertainment in spite of the sound problems.