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.