Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings tells the story of the men and women who flew mail over the Andes Mountains back in the 1930s. This was at a time when airplanes where largely wood framed craft covered with cloth and powered by temperamental engines that could barely get planes over the high Andes passes. Many craft were lost, along with the pilots who flew them. The French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about the experience in his novel Night Flight which was given the Hollywood treatment in 1933. I've never seen that film, but I seriously doubt that it could be better than Hawks' film. Hawks was, after all, a master at creating atmosphere and winding up the tension.

Only Angels Have Wings follows the adventures of an air cargo service run by Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) and Dutchy (Sig Raumann). Geoff and his crew - The Kidd (Thomas Mitchell), Les (Allyn Joslyn), Sparks (Victor Killian), and Joe (Noah Berry, Jr.) - fly mail and freight to villages and mining camps on the other side of the mountains. It's hard dangerous work in planes that are barely able to make the flights. Some of the planes have been patched back together so many times that they are little more the chewing gum and bailing wire. The pilots who fly the route are men who have exhausted all of their other career opportunities - they do this job because it's the only flying job they can get. They're fearless, even reckless, but they get the mail through. Into this cocky group of men comes Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a nightclub singer touring South America. She falls for Geoff, but he was burned in the past and is not having any part of her. She decides to stay on for a bit to see if she can't get him to change his mind. Meanwhile, Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess) arrives with his wife, Judy (Rita Hayworth). Bat has come to sign on as a new pilot, but he's responsible for the death of the Kid's brother years earlier and Judy is the woman who broke Geoff's heart. As if this weren't enough, Geoff and Dutchy have to make a certain number of flights in order to win a lucrative contract, but the weather is getting worse and they're running out of lanes and fit pilots.

With all of the pieces in place, Hawks slowly ratchets up the tension as the flights become more dangerous and plane after plane crashes. The tension also grows between Judy, Geoff and Bonnie, as Geoff tries to forget about the former and open himself up to the latter. And all of this takes place against the backdrop of a rustic bar and a tiny airport somewhere on the coast of South America during the Great Depression. These are people with nothing to go home to and nothing to lose, fighting a desperate battle - pitting canvas, wood, and steel against nature itself - to create a business and a life they can call their own. But with all of the death and injury portrayed, Only Angels Have Wings is ultimately a story of hope, a story of how it is possible to prevail against the all the odds if you believe in your dream hard enough.

Only Angels Have Wings is rated G and is available in glorious black and white.