If you want to scoop deep into the real murky moral ambiguity of war, the heart of the heart of darkness, take to the air and hunt the pre-code 1930s WWI flying ace movies written by John Monk Saunders, where dogfights and aerial maneuvers are performed in the era's rickety biplanes by day and mortifying guilt and despair is drunk away with rousing camaraderie by night. Footage recycled from the silent film Wings (1927- based on Saunders' book) depicts the war almost metatexutally, disconnecting the violence via quasi-kabuki anonymity as pilots are shot at through rear projection, adding to a sense of depersonalized, out-of-time aloneness 'up there' in the deadly skies. Since all the pilots wear the same evil-looking goggles it becomes important to cast actors with differing jaw lines, leading to some pretty strange specimens and accentuating the anonymity of death. The same Red Baron-type hun shoots and dies and salutes either way, in the same footage, in almost every one of these films but that only serves to unite them, and together they make a startling picture of a moment in time in between the advent of sound and the arrival of Hitler, Joseph Breen, and Hirohito crushed out Hollywood's anti-war sentiment.
It's hard to imagine there was ever such a time, when it was possible to think no overseas war could ever be worth fighting, before Hitler made such thinking forever naive. But there was, and in the era of 1930-34 the conscience-stricken flying ace films of Saunders' were more than up-to-the-minute reflections of the forgotten man's deep disillusionment over coming home to the Depression, or providers of flying ace thrills. They also eyeballed the sketchy border between war as a boy's holiday from the Ten Commandments and the post-war (or even post-battle) isolationist post-traumatic stress. Looking back from our 21st century high, wherein hindsight has been proven our involvement in WWII a worthwhile endeavor, Saunders' 1930-33 films haunt the landscape like a dark shadow. No wonder they were seldom re-released and are now available only on Warner's Archive or Amazon downloads.
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| Saunders and wife, Fay Wray |
As you know, I take a strong stance on the importance of death and drugs / alcohol abuse in being able to face the existential horror of the void and, more importantly, stay sane enough to tell the tale while remaining poetic enough to make it flow like wine to the eye drums. Death opens the door to the screaming Lovecraftian horror of life, the terrifying tentacled devourer in the blackness waiting right outside your bubble of delusion, and the booze allows you to stare right into its gleaming, rotten yellow eye, and wink like a half-digested Jon Voight. Without booze, this grim confrontation which all sensitive poet hunters and fisherman must make every time they look into the terrified, dying eye of their prey, would be unendurable. Where would Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, or John Monk Saunders be without the booze OR the horror, the 'blue devil', the 'spook' that comes with war or delirium tremens? Like W.C. Fields keeping serpents handy to warrant his use of 'snake bite remedy,' without these visionaries would not our generation, too, be lost, falling in a downward spiral like Major Kong? You may argue that it is in such a spiral, and you'd be right, but man have we learned how to plummet!
Saunders' first filmed story was WINGS (above) in 1927. A turning point in aerial combat war realism onscreen, Saunders provided a probably accurate recording of the bloody birth of the modern mechanical man and the nerves of steel that allowed him to soar into machine gun fire at 3,000 feet, and the way the alcohol and mademoiselles of gay Paris provided a welcoming bubble in which to crash. Audiences loved the aerial stunt photography, and thanks to Saunders they also caught a whiff of the full-on madness of cartoon champagne bubbles and Clara Bow's imitation of an uptight nurse's imitation of a vampiric courtesan.
But it is later, in the sound era, in a disturbing, brilliant WWI quadrilogy of pre-code sound films, where Saunders finds his true naked lunch 'how to keep your cool even when the walls are trying to eat you' calling.
The early 30s pre-code years were themselves naturally existential: Remember my Forgotten Man? He hurled his lunch across the land? Remember how a totally ineffectual censorship board made it easy to tell the truth about the pre-Social Security and unemployment insurance-era's widespread poverty, horror, disillusionment, sexual double standards, war-related post-traumatic stress, and the seething resentment over prohibition?
The time had come to reflect the horror of the previous war, as isolationists were already looking anxiously towards Hitler's rise and Japan's aggression against China. Saunders was the right man for the job, giving us a little aerial action in the process via: THE DAWN PATROL (1930), THE LAST FLIGHT (1931), and THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933) and ACE OF ACES (1933). Let's examine!
THE DAWN PATROL (1930)Directed by Howard Hawks (Warner Bros.)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Neil Hamilton
In the first scene of this early Howard Hawks film, Commander Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon) rants on and on about the cold idiocy up the chain of command, but from then on, the film gets better, and was even remade by Edmund Goulding in 1938 as a vehicle for Errol Flynn and David Niven. Basil Rathbone took Hamilton's role and his pointed fey affect made the anti-idiocy rants better but there's a brooding soulfulness missing from Flynn that's all over the joint with Richard Barthelmess. As with Hawks' best films, there's a querencia, an enclosed shelter within which our brave group waits, drinks, smokes, sings, and passes out. And like all the best Hawks, we're made aware of every drink poured and cigarette rolled and match lit, and no one leaves a drink behind half-full. We come to know the layout of the place very well, like a second home. The bunks are upstairs, the bar is downstairs, and the CO's office opens out onto the bar, making it easy to hear your orders, get drunk, and then carry the lightweights up to bed all without going outside in the rain or having to deal with women.
I was a big fan of the remake (here) and longed to see this one, and it's available at last via WB Archives. It turns out Goulding's film borrowed most of the dogfights, and as such should take a knee and heed the older film's wisdom. Richard Barthelmess as Capt. Courtney isn't quite as dashing as Flynn, but he's more believable, more method. When he gets out of his plane after a mission his legs wobble, like mine after mowing the grass. He's far less boisterous than Errol Flynn, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is less jolly but more authentically inside a war than David Niven. Sometimes it may be hard to understand why Barthelmess was considered such a star, he's so stocky and short and thin-lipped, but there's a lot of acting going on behind his lidded Peter Lorre eyes, even while the rest of him stays posed like a wax statue. But all his statue posture is worth savoring because of the flickering warm light in those eyes when he sees Scotty come back alive (with bottles) that made me almost choke up, whereas in the remake the same scene is merely jubilant and exhilarating.
All in all and remake aside, Hawks' 1930 version is the CITIZEN KANE of WWI ace pics, and balances the anti-war sentiment with a more stoic existential acceptance of duty, which is where it comes in as a great acid film, since part of tripping involves keeping your cool and shrugging it off even when the walls are melting and the handrails down the stairs are like two pincers and the steps the tongue of some throbbing scarab beetle, and everyone you see seems to be bleeding even when they're not and you can see the blood pulsing through their translucent skin. Oh my god, so much blood almost always about to spill. Maybe it's not the same as 'really' being in a war, but then again, maybe only schizophrenics, war vets, and survivors of 12 hour-long nightmare STP trips truly understand one another. BANG!
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After the credits, sometime, the war ends and the surviving pilots go in various directions, usually after some opening scenes borrowed from WINGS and DAWN PATROL. Some pilots go home to usher in the early days of commercial flight, ala AIR HOSTESS (1933) and CEILING ZERO (1936). Some go into barnstorming. If they're too shot-up or broken and can't even fly a safe boring passenger route (which according to one ex-barnstormer is "like being a trolley conductor") they can try air mail routes in South America, over the Andes ala NIGHT FLIGHT (1933, my appreciation here) or ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939). If they're too damaged even for that, there's always staying in prohibition-free Paris and drinking themselves into sweet oblivion, as with:
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Director: Williem Dieterle (for Warners)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Helen Chandler, David Manners
After opening on a wordless montage of war footage that stretches from random explosions and WWI shots of tanks, exploding boats, the overhead bomb money shot from DAWN PATROL, and aerial footage from WINGS, there is, spliced in, anonymous goggled close-ups showing the fiery crash that has allowed pilot Cary (Barthlemess) and his rear gunner Shep (David Manners) to be too fucked up to fly again. They are, as their doctor describes them as they're discharged after the war, "heading out to face life, when all their whole training was in preparation for death." It was the preparation for death that had been, of course, Saunder's job during the war as a flight trainer. "I'm afraid they're like projectiles, shaped for war. Hurled at the enemy, they described a beautiful high-arching trajectory, and now they've fallen back to earth... spent... cooled off... useless." The doctor keeps going, noting that they fell 600 feet, "like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement - it shattered both of them." On the plus side it legitimizes their desire to live and die awash in a sea of boozy screwball gibber-gabber.
Saunders had clearly been reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald before writing this and it could have become a cult classic if directed by a rapidfire overlapping dialogue and smoking and drinking wiz like Hawks, or a good dialogue director like George Cukor or someone with a dark-streaked screwball comedic humanism like Leo McCarey, or even Norman Z. McLeod. But, in the hands of once-impoverished German immigrant Willam Dieterle, the champagne bubble dialogue sinks down and strains against the wind, revealing only a prefunctory understanding of boozy tuxedo modernism and the natural flow of spoken English. Everyone over enunciates, waiting for the other to finish talking, allowing a long pause between each speaker, like a tableful of drunks never would in real life. The result feels like a 1929 Paramount Marx Brothers movie directed by a drunken Todd Browning, with the cast of DRACULA (1931) all playing Groucho and Geoffrey from UNDER THE VOLCANO at the same time though without a slur. Which sounds great, by the way, and almost is
Another unsolvable problem with THE LAST FLIGHT is that, aside from Barthelmess and Manners, the crew of fellow drunk aviators aren't very hip. It's really only Richard Barthelmess and David Manners that Nikki likes, and we like. The others are all fairly unexceptional, especially the creepy masher they can never get rid of Frink (Walter Byron, whose creepy lingering stops most of the zaniness from being really fun; then again, "who cares?" is their motto) and the loud Texan played by Johnny Mack Brown, who tackles horses and rocks the flattest of twangs. There's also Elliot Nugent (who'd go on to direct the awesome 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY) as Francis, the shot-up, dour marksman who ends up spending most of the time eyeballing Frink, though he waits until almost the end to finally do us all a favor and shoot him. Luckily for us there's a weird poetry in the casting of Helen Chandler as Nikki and David Manners, who seem even more ESP-whisp-thereal than they did in the same year's DRACULA (1931). As Barthelmess's tippling pal and ex-gunner, Manners' dreamy poeticism finds a great natural outlet--we believe he's forgotten what month it is due to round-the-clock drinking for weeks-- and when he dies shot in a cab and proclaims "in a way this is may be the best thing that ever happened to me" I, at least, believe him. And it's understandable that both he and Nikki would be so drawn to the quiet strength of Barthelmess' scarred pilot: he's rooted, planted, and they seem to float when standing still, their eyes following wisps around the room only the two of them can see, making them like a taller, drunker version of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
And the similarities of DRACULA and FLIGHT don't end there: Chandler's character Nikki is much more like the Mina in Stoker's novel of DRACULA than her Mina was in Todd Browning's adaptation. She might be reading crazy gonzo lines but she's delivering them like she's about to cry or relate her strange dream of a dark figure coming out of the mist to a shrink. In the novel she becomes a kind of revered icon-mascot for Van Helsing, Harker, Dr. Seward and Lucy's three grief-stricken suitors, including a Texan. If Walter Byron's sleazy masher was Dracula, it would all be set, but in a way, the war already had that role, making it really like Dracula part 2, wherein Manners, Chandler, Van Barthelmess and co. all try to drink away the awful memories of, and wounds from, their big climactic staking. In real life, Chandler would later experience kinship with monsters horrified by their lack of recognizable mirror reflection, as Wiki notes that "she ironically fell victim to alcoholism later in life and was badly disfigured in a fire caused by falling asleep while smoking." And of course vampirism is a great metaphor for dependence on alcohol, morphine, or the horrors of war ("the tic doesn't work when he's tight, so he stays tight"), the keys that open the lock of great literature and art. If only I was there, I could have helped them ditch Frink sooner and man we'd have a time - they drink like I used to, and have the same infallible sense of surrealist absurdity and a hatred of mashers. Brushing aside Frink's dour lechery, Mick La Salle notes in his essential 2002 book, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (where I first learned about Saunders' films, so this post owes La Salle a heavy debt):
"These men are past an interest in sex, too smashed up inside for small human things to make much difference. Their playful mooning over [Nikki's] legs, feet, and back is ghostly, as if evoking a dim memory when such things were to live and die for...."
"Nikki isn't a woman of the world, but an airy figure with a child's honesty and an adult's sadness, a female version of the men. (Chandler, whose own hopeless alcoholism would lead to tragedy, couldn't help but bring a special truth to the role.)" (p. 100)
La Salle's take on DRACULA in the preceding chapter seems welded to these Saunders' films: "With Dracula, American cinema stumbled on a way of depicting life on the absolute edge, one step from the abyss." (p. 80)
The presence of Barthelmess makes it also a sequel to THE DAWN PATROL, and a perfect distillation of trying to drink away one's broken watch status via the icy abstraction of martinis and a beautiful, hard-drinking girl (a Zelda).
Throughout the film the idea of being 'a big success' is played with, and the competition to be the last one in the room with Nikki is part of that, and also what drives Francis to finally off Frink, requiring Francis's subsequent disappearance into the Lisbon shadows. "This is the first time he's looked truly happy," notes Nikki as she watches Frances disappear. Manners has also been (accidentally) shot in the fracas, and a sense of VERTIGO / Purloined letter circular death drive-aliciousness ensues for as he slowly dies in the back of a cab, Shep reports feeling like he's falling, and falling... like he and Cary did in the opening scene over the skies and screens of France. "He was ready to die once," he notes, "and he was ready to die again."
Here it is, the real love affair of the story, that between Barthelmess and Manners, the way men bond eternally in the field of combat, like orphans forever clinging to paddle-less rafts during battles with shadowy Robert Mitchums (imagine if Stewart in VERTIGO had a buddy to fall into the infinite with, someone other than motherin' Midge). "Comradeship," says Barthelmess, "was all we had left."
And maybe that's what the real lure of war is for men at home: as an escapist grim fantasia of true brotherhood and comradeship and no prohibition or small town morals, a place where it's just buds against the world, fire arms instead of nagging wives, the chance to prove one's mettle when it's all stripped down to just you and the guys experiencing the same hell the next seat over. And Barthelmess--his usually impassive face contorting into a slow burn wide-eyed terror at being finally unable to save his gunner's life (they finally crash after all these years of falling)--cradles Manners as he dies like a lover. But when it comes to pitching confessional woo to Nikki in their private train car back to Paris he seems to doing some lipless burlesque of what having lips is like. Still, the pair's lonesome auras collide finally and the sense of two lost souls clinging to each other continues, both are grateful that something and someone at least lets them pretend they're not already crashed.
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Then, in 1933, the year Hitler consolidated power, Saunders wrote two movies that reflected a new isolationist propaganda stance. This was when the need to start mobilizing one's military industrial complex was vastly more important than most people in their sloshed disillusionment then realized, not only because arms build-up would lift us out of the Depression (there was no need to stay in Paris to get drunk now that Prohibition was repealed). but because as Mick La Salle notes in his chapter on Barthelmess in Dangerous Men, "In the same year (1933) that The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces debuted, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. Had the United States found the will that year to throw a net over Hitler, tens of millions of lives might have been spared."
Well, anyway, they're great stuff now that they can't do any real damage to freedom, so here we go:
THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)Directed by Stuart Walker (for Paramount)
Starring: Frederic March, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Jackie Oakie
The description of this film tend to describe it as a love triangle between Frederic "King of the Triangles" March, rising Paramount star Cary Grant (in the same year he played opposite Mae West in her two best pictures), and a vamped-to-the-point-she's-ceased-to-look-human Carole Lombard (billed only as 'the beautiful lady' she seems daemonic enough to be a bit like the bloofer lady in DRACULA). But Cary Grant and Lombard never actually share a single scene in the film, and at left Lombard more resembles a wife or WAC in a WWII home front propaganda piece rather than a mysterious sympathetic ear wrapped in ermine who March trysts with in Hyde park on leave. And Cary Grant is no hero, but a sociopathic if ultimately loyal gunner to March. Grant's hawkish vibe allows March to play the guilt-stricken noble. He becomes a top ace, he has to get progressively drunker to keep it together once his body count rises, to the point a grinning French general pinning a medal on him can smell the alcohol on his breath even in the pouring rain! Death, where is thy sting?
The thing that tears the game up more than anything for March's character is that he can't admit how much he loves to kill. When he comes back from his first foray over the lines he's exhilarated and giddy, only to find his gunner is dead behind him. From then on, he's horrified not by fear of being killed, but of being responsible somehow for the deaths of his gunners (he loses five in a matter of months) while he gets his kicks. It's guilt for loving killing and facing death. These bi-planes have never before seemed so rickety, ready to fall to pieces at a moment's notice, and when one of his gunners later simply falls out during a loop-de-loop maneuver, March's decent into alcoholism and existential guilt goes from spiral to straight downward dive-bomb.
What's less exciting is the way, just like Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957), March's self-righteous anti-war stance includes blissful freedom from the big picture, i.e. the responsibility endured by Neil Hamilton in DAWN PATROL. It's very convenient to bad cop it to a higher up and play the wounded dove without worry of the long-ranging sociopolitical consequences. That said, March's performance is brilliantly modulated and it's quite intense watching his polite veneer slowly crumble under strain of conscience, until, during the big binge in his honor (after he shoots down Voss, a Richtofen-like ace who's barely out of his teens), March finally snaps, interrupting his fellow flier's drunken singing with a crazy rant ending with: "I earn my medals for killing kids!" He then staggers off to his room and commits suicide, a tour de force statement!
La Salle notes that Jerry's suicide had a real-life parallel to Saunders' real life booze-enhanced turmoil: "Seven years after the film was made, Saunders, age 42, hanged himself." (105) That would be 1940. You do the math; he died along with any socratic ideal of a future negotiated peace with Hitler.
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I'd hazard a guess too that, for one of WWI's more peerless Air Corps. fiction authors, Saunders' lack of actual combat experience equal to that of his characters reflects his guilt more than his characters' killing kids. This is perhaps the one weak aspect of his work but as far as weak aspects go, you won't find these kinds of sentiments voiced so clearly anywhere else in pre-code film. Other writers were either anti-war pacifists, or "over there / over there" lemmings but Saunders really explored the actuality of the grisly homicidal fish that bites the propaganda lure, with a boozer's realization that they were two sides of a same lousy nickel-plated excuse to get away with murder.
Director: J. Walter Rubin (for RKO)
Starring: Richard Dix, Elizabeth Allan, Ralph Bellamy, Theodore Newton, Joe Sauers
Rocky (Richard Dix) and his fiancee, Nancy (Elizabeth Allan) begin the film in an idyllic upper class garden guarded by a strangely disagreeable garden gnome. Another man runs over. It's war! He just saw the paper! Rocky ain't having it, and he and Nancy later have an argument of principles while parade footage unfurls below his sculpture of a winged angel. She leaves him for his 'cowardice.' Which leads to the next scene, Dix entering his new barracks to meet his fellow fliers, while a guitarist sings "Ten thousand dollars for the folks back home / ten thousand dollars / for the family," while they roll up the possessions of the latest killed flier whose bunk Rocky's taking.
It's a startlingly modern scene, too hip for 1918 or even 1933. It's like they should be swindling Tony Curtis out of his sax or chasing James Dean around an abandoned swimming pool. "This is tombstone Terry, the Tennessee Terror, otherwise known as Dracula!" The man leans forward to eye Rocky's neck, "Welcome to the ranks of the undead!" (WWI ended 13 years before the premiere of the 1931 Lugosi original, mind you). Weirder, they each have a pet of the power animal emblazoned on their ships: Rocky has a lion cub and there's a chimp who drinks, a dog, a parrot, and a pig with an iron cross tattoo. Each bunk has a flag with the amount of killed enemy planes represented on it by big 'X' stickers. The plane of each man is taken care of like a teenager takes care of his Pontiac Firebird.
Then there's the ingenious way Rocky's artistic understanding of natural light benefits him in dogfights. He becomes an ace via a montage that suggests Saunders was quite taken with SCARFACE. Rocky chokes on the trigger at first and has to get winged in the shoulder by an enemy bullet before he mans up and squeezes his trigger. The boys celebrate his kill and Dix realizes that he may never make the grade as a sculptor, but this bloody brand of performance has a nice adrenalin kicker.
But what is the 'meaning' behind this art? When we see the bloody face of the enlisted man Dix smacks with an ammo belt because he loaded it wrong, we know we're not supposed to be buying war bonds in the lobby. This shit gets personal. And the very hip disaffection of the fliers bears out my theory that war and acid are just two different sides of the same empty, terrifying void.
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| The Lemming and the Lion |
When, in his initial coward-branding by nurse Nancy, Rocky decries war as a chance to duck out on your wife, and work, and responsibility, you know he's right, and he gets to say I told you so after she's dealt with being shelled and overrun by mud and the bloody wounded. She later regrets goading him into enlisting but he'll have none of it: "This is a great war and I'm having a grand time; every minute is grand!" He's high on the cleanness of the war up where he is, the feeling of life and death so close and all that separates them the movements of his plane and firing of his guns: "Yes, it's a great war. I hope the next one is half as good!" He's giddy with insane sardonicism but his eyes look empty, reflecting DEATH DREAM somnambulism that some critics dismiss as Dix's wooden acting style. But behind that wooden mask lurks an agonized sculptor who has given up trying to hold onto his humanity, since he knows it will only get him killed. Like all sensitive artists, he starts out with far too much humanity to begin with, so has to just jettison it all. When he makes a brusque pass, Nancy balks. He exclaims war is is no time for scruples: "How can you refuse whatever you have to give?!" He all but twists her earlier words back into her face, and the moral hypocrisy of placing import on a woman's virginity dissolves in WWI almost as if that was the whole point of the war in the first place.
Luckily there's a happy ending, albeit with a strange 'is this just a dream' quality, like the end of TAXI DRIVER or VERTIGO or LAST FLIGHT. Rocky winds up the film back in the garden and in Nancy's arms, harmony restored: "We'll live only for ourselves, and by ourselves," she says, an eloquent if impossible advocations of the romantic ideal behind isolationist pacifism and the fantasy that America could take all the time it wanted to lick its wounds and Europe would just sort itself out on its own. America was still a teenager at 157 in 1933 it was clear that the nation would never get a chance to even get comfortable with itself before being shipped off to die in yet another country's war. Rocky's last line, though meant as a joke, leaves a chilling after-effect: as he and Nancy embrace in the garden, Rocky eyes the garden gnome that bugged him in the film's first scene, noting cryptically, "I still don't like the looks of that guy." Who else could that gnome be, but Adolph Hitler?
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