The Brotherhood of Melted Wings: THE DAWN PATROL (1938)

Say a prayer for the dead already / and salute those next to die!" -- Lucy Westerna, reciting an old airman's drinking song (DRACULA, 1931)

A bad LSD trip can leave you traumatized for weeks, cut off from a general populace who cannot see beyond their collective fog of assured continuity to understand why you're so pallid. The blinders that obscure the constant threat of death for them are, for you, broken; the rays of the black void shine into your soul even if you close your eyes and look away. For those poor fools around you it's business as usual; they are glazed-eyed consumers on their endless rotation from cubicle to couch to bed. You sit outside it all, screaming inside, clawing softly at the fleshy disguise you call a face as if its a prison you might escape. A feeling of lost futility overwhelms your every thought and gesture...

But lo! THE DAWN PATROL is waiting!

In soothing black and white the doomed airmen await their time to die up in the air over the blackened trenches of WWI, they understand your existential anguish! Are they not, in their way, the living dead? Look at the way the pilot up top resembles a corpse right out of a Joe Kubert WEIRD WAR TALES cover. (left) You can feel both the beating of modernism's horrified, hideous heart and smell the dread of the next war, already in progress, which America was eyeballing with the remorse of a redacted father. 


Though helmed by "ladies' choice" director Edmund Goulding (GRAND HOTEL, DARK VICTORY), DAWN PATROL is all men and--manlier still--a remake of an early sound Howard Hawks film. I've no qualm with this version as Goulding is just fine at capturing camaraderie of either gender, and always had a great fatalistic streak -- you can feel death and despair being ever pushed back, every gesture of his actors like drowning souls struggling through the La Brea tar pits. Like Hawks he keeps shots at a medium level to allow us to feel part of the action, part of the brotherhood of airmen, who treat their captured German pilots with respect, giving them drinks and food before the MPs take them away. And of course our airmen agonize over all the fresh young recruits, most of whom are shot down during their first soiree. What's most important in a film like this, since it's almost all male actors, is that the actors be first rate and with Basil Rathbone as the C.O., bravely taking the heat from righteous pilot Errol Flynn and drunken wingman David Niven, you got a deck stacked for easy grifting.


And drinking, man is there a lot of well-deserved drinking, and after a bad trip, honey, if you don't have a drink or something to put your lights out you're going to be hallucinating ghost fingers ripping your soul apart all night. But you do have drinks, and they're apparently free, since the bar is your HQ. DAWN PATROL puts you in that same pleasant zone, that land where you too belong to something cooler than yourself and the bartender is a personal friend.



The big existential question for these pilots isn't how or why, but when? The answer is always the same: very soon. Eckhart Tolle (or was it Ram Dass?) writes of working with death row inmates and how they would have big breakthroughs when death was looming, turning to the glory of the eternal now like instant messiahs. But then, if, say, the convict got off the short list and were put back in the general population, they'd get cocky and forget the eternal now, becoming hungry ghosts bartering for smokes once more.

Hawks and Hemingway understood it: they knew they had to be cozied up to death to write worth a damn. Like it or not, having survived the horrors of a bad acid trip, you're now in that same league as Hemingway and Hawks surviving the horrors of war. And knocking back a few with THE DAWN PATROL can be like starving for days as a stow away in a filthy crate on a boat only to learn you've got a pre-paid royal suite with a fully-stocked bar. You wouldn't appreciate the glory of the bar without first enduring the fear and filth. Every Icarus needs his wings melted before he can be of any mythic use, you just don't get to find that out until your wings burn, and you know Marlene's not to blame if you never got a chance to practice your roll.