THE SCREEN IN REVIEW: Howard Hawks's 'Only Angels Have Wings' Reaches Music Hall
Frank S. Nugent, May 12, 1939
Howard
Hawks, whose aviation melodramas must, we suspect, drive airline stock down
from two to three points per showing, has produced another fatality-littered
thriller in "Only Angels Have Wings" (even the title is ominous)
which opened yesterday at the Music Hall. This once, however, Mr. Hawks has
charitably transferred his operations base to Ecuador, presumably having
exhausted his local sources, not to mention the patience of the commercial
transport people.
In
Ecuador, in the banana port of Barranca, he has
indulged himself and the vicarious adventurers in the audience in a delightful
series of crack-ups, close-shaves and studiously dramatic speeches. It is all
very exciting and Juvenile.
Barranca, says Mr. Hawks, is a sultry little spot
boasting a general store and bar, a swampy landing field and Cary Grant as
operations manager for a junky air line which must
maintain a regular schedule for six months to obtain the mail subsidy. Flying
conditions are rarely better than impossible. There are the Andes,
there is a narrow pass with clawing crags and a group of pilots who seem to be
broad targets for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, chiefly of
feminine origin.
We
particularly marveled at one sequence in which a flyer, grounded by failing
eyesight, breaks another's arm in a fight and soon is helping probe a bullet
from the commander's shoulder. That is known as piling it on.
Not
content with this fell set-up, Mr. Hawks, as author, has chosen to add a few
dramatic and romantic complications. Miss Arthur enters the scene as a stranded
showgirl, and a less convincing showgirl than Miss Arthur would be hard to
find. Enter, too, Richard Barthelmess as a pilot with
a black blot on his record and a wife who, by some strange coincidence, used to
be Mr. Grant's fiancée.
The
brew stirs slowly, as is the way with two-hour shows, tending toward silly
romanticism in its dialogue, but moving splendidly whenever the plot's wheels
leave the ground and take off over the Andes.
Few
things, after all, are as exciting as a plane in flames, or the metallic voices
of a pilot in a fog-shrouded plane and the chap in the radio room, or a
screaming power dive, or the wild downward swoop of a plane taking off from a
canyon's rim.
Mr.
Hawks has staged his flying sequences brilliantly. He has caught the drama in
the meeting of a flier and the brother of the man he killed. He has made proper
use of the amiable performing talents of Mr. Grant, Miss Arthur, Thomas
Mitchell, Mr. Barthelmess, Sig Rumann
and the rest. But when you add it all up, "Only Angels Have Wings"
comes to an overly familiar total. It's a fairly good melodrama, nothing more.