Höllenflieger

I saw this movie many years ago, and just tonight on DVD. Wow. This film has been remastered by the UCLA Archives, and the sound is very clear. Clear enough, that you can hear some rather explicit language coming from Monte during the dogfight sequence. And if you understand German, there is even more. Definitely before the Code. This is a Great film, and for those who would criticize the acting, editing, etc, compare it to other films made during the first years of the "talkie era." It stands up very well. Pay special attention to the wounded pilots as they are dying in their planes. Very gritty. The realism of the aerial battles has never been equaled. This film is a true classic. How many other classic films circa 1930 come to mind? Not many.

Having just watched my VHS of this and wondering if it was out on DVD yet, I came to the IMDB to check and saw a comment about how hackneyed and awful this movie was, with the worst traits of the silent movies...lol! For those who don't know, this WAS a silent movie, and Hughes took so long trying to perfect the aerial sequences that sound came along, so then he had to try to rework everything else into sound, delaying things even further. Hughes was a "bit" of a perfectionist, ala Chaplin with "City Lights" and for every wonderful thing that does, it creates dozens of others you have to deal with as well... My favorite story of the making of this movie (recalling across 30 years from a book by Donald Dwiggins called "The Stunt Pilots" involved Paul Mantz (one of the lead pilots, later to die making "Flight of the Phoenix" after being the king of the Hollywood pilots for over 30 years) and Jean Harlow waiting in an airport restaurant for Hughes to fly in from somewhere and Mantz placing a nickel Coca-Cola bottle under a table leg before Hughes arrived and telling Harlow to "watch this". Hughes arrives for the meeting and being the perfectionist but also a bit ?, he never says anything about the table, never looks under it, but spends the whole lunch trying to eat with one hand and hold the table level with the other....

My roommates and I saw a few minutes of this many years ago, and we spent weeks poring over TV listings and video rentals to find more of this movie. We were not disappointed. The aerial combat scenes are, quite simply, the most astounding ever. Some scenes show DOZENS of REAL airplanes roiling in a frighteningly tight ball like a cloud of gnats, and barely missing each other. 3 pilots died filming this movie. I'm forever spoiled for the safe choreography, heavy editing, and airplane-free skies of Top Gun... Hell's Angels has real pilots doing really scary stuff. Real planes crashing into real hillsides, not "drifting behind a sand dune and then setting off a gasoline pot."

I now scoff at the computer-generated zeppelin scenes in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." Howard Hughes kicked their butts over 70 years earlier.

Some of the movie is melodramatic and dated, but some human scenes are brutally harsh, powerful, and would never get filmed today because they're TOO chilling.

A really stunning movie, which not only holds up, but betters today's air movies.

Howard Hughes produced and directed (with a little help from Edmund Goulding and Howard Hawks) this 1930 aerial extravaganza, whose plot is both hackneyed and largely irrelevant, since one is merely waiting for the heavy melodrama to end so as to feast one's eyes on Jean Harlow and aerial combat scenes. The photography is magnificent, and one gets a kind of God's eye view of reenactments of World War I dogfights. The leading actors, Ben Lyon and James Hall, playing brothers, give such intense performances as to suggest at times that they are not merely emotionally but romantically attached to one another. Those old-fangled airplanes are something to see, as is a gigantic zeppelin, and the combat scenes, full of billowing clouds, the sky full of airplanes that resemble orange crates with wings, buzzing and whistling through the air like flies, are the stuff of dreams, and make this otherwise turgid movie come alive and live in one's mind long after it's over.

Brothers Roy (James Hall) and Monte Rutledge (Ben Lyon) enlist in the Royal Flying Corp and end up flying dangerous missions over England and France in the early days of aerial combat. Howard Hugh's film is best remembered for its extensive aerial footage, involving dozens of aircraft including period-correct Royal Aircraft Factory S. E.5s, Fokker D. VIIs, and a 1920s Sikorsky S-29-A mocked up to look like a German Gotha bomber. The flying scenes (real and in miniature) are outstanding with the attack on the Zeppelin over London and the crash of a large bomber standouts. The epic production, during which several planes were destroyed and three pilots/crew lost their lives, was said to be the most expensive ever (although this may have been marketing hyperbole), partly because it was caught in the silent-to-talkie transition period and needed to be extensively reshot before release. The simplistic 'human story-line' about the brothers, one heroic, one cowardly, is much less memorable with a lot of stilted dialogue, artificial-sounding bonhomie, and trite romantic melodrama (involving up-right Roy's pining after Helen (Jean Harlow), a peroxide blond vamp of dubious morals who seems more interested in variety than sobriety). The pre-code film contains some expletives (shocking then, tame now), Harlow wears some clingy and revealing dresses at times, and the scene in which a character is shot in the back is extremely real looking ( for an era when most 'shot people' simply put a hand on their chest and fell over wearing a shocked expression). A must see for fans of both vintage films and of vintage aircraft.