Air Eagles

This lumbering early sound film can be added to the roll call of aviation movies of the day - WINGS, DAWN PATROL, LAST FLIGHT, DEVIL'S SQUADRON, EAGLE AND THE HAWK.

This time it's barnstorming airmen, making the film a curious comparison with THE GYPSY MOTHS. The cast combines the talents of silent movie leading men Hughes (Ella Cinders, Lost World) and Kerry (Hunchback of Notre Dame), John Ford's resident heavy Churchill and technicians who would later work in the serials. Neither the performances or the handling create much interest but it is curious to hear the leads' voices and the subject and it's small town USA setting deliver some interest.

Lloyd Hughes and Norman Kerry are barnstormers for Berton Churchill's carnival. Every show, they go up in the air to do battle with live ammunition. There's no real money in it, so when they hit Hughes' home town, they stay at his folks' place and discuss how to make more money so one of them can marry one of the show's pretty girls, Shirley Grey. But Miss Grey begins a romance with Hughes' brother, Matty Kemp. Kemp is a pilot too, and has just gotten a job carrying the payroll for a mine. Kerry suggests that the three of them can split the money and fly away with Miss Grey.

It's an okay little drama, with the aerial sequences being the main selling point for the audience. None of the principals would prosper in the talkies, stuck in B pictures and uncredited bits in the majors. Kerry, in particular, was a sad case. Four years earlier he had been co-staring in major productions at MGM. Sound had revealed a voice at odds with his star persona, and here he's reduced to the fifth wheel and villain in the plot. He would disappear from the screen for nine years, with one minor role ten years later. He died in 1956, aged 61.