Les anges de l'enfer

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.

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.

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....

With the release of "The Aviator" there will be renewed, and well deserved, interest in this classic. Hell's Angels holds together surprisingly well for a 75 year old film. Sure there is the over-emoting one would expect from a film that bridges the era between silents and talkies, but the character development is good, the flight scenes are amazing and the story holds the attention from beginning to end. And we haven't even talked about Jean Harlow!! There can be no doubt that Howard Hughes was a genius, a perfectionist, and that he set out to, and did, produce of of the greatest movies of all time. The most expensive film of it's day, and worth every penny.

I saw this film (movie) in about 1933 and still remember every scene. Without the use of bad language it conveyed the fear,excitement,and gallantry of the time. The German evil was perhaps overplayed,but it was made just a very few years after the War. The flying scenes were dramatic and at least as effective as any made in recent years.

Is it possible to obtain a copy?if so where.