Flight

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.