Only Angels Have Wings ***** (1939, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Jean Arthur) – Classic Movie Review 1261

Director Howard Hawks’s 1939 high-flying classic stars Cary Grant as Geoff Carter, a pilot and the manager of Barranca Airways, a tatty airmail and freight service working out of Ecuador.

The small, barely solvent air service is owned by ‘Dutchy’ Van Ruyter (Sig Ruman) and carries mail from the fictional South American port town of Barranca through a high pass in the Andes Mountains. The pilots have to contend with broken-down planes and hazardous conditions to deliver the mail over the dangerous and usually foggy mountain pass.

Also aboard this vintage classic aviation romantic adventure drama are Jean Arthur as Bonnie Lee, a feisty piano-playing entertainer stranded at the small airport while waiting for her boat, Richard Barthelmess as an infamous cowardly pilot, and the young and lovely Rita Hayworth as his sexy wife Judy MacPherson, who is also Carter’s old flame. Bonnie Lee soon becomes infatuated with Carter.

Director Hawks, who provided the original story, examines the life and loves of the pilots of a small commercial airline in one of his best and most archetypal films. He makes a lovely job of showing the professionalism of the pilots, the group spirit, the aviation atmosphere and the flying sequences.

There’s luminous acting from the special cast, with Grant and Arthur sharing good screen chemistry and Hayworth making her first major impact in the movies after a dozen insignificant appearances in Columbia Studios films.

It’s firmly and securely based on a compelling, tightly wound screenplay by Jules Furthman (with contributions by Eleanore Griffin and William Rankin) based on the story written by Hawks, who provides the assured and imaginative direction. It was inspired by a number of real incidents witnessed by Hawks and the stoic aviation personnel he had met while making another movie in Mexico.

After all these years, it looks a bit set bound and stagy, as well as very obviously dated, but all very attractively so. Story and stars and planes still triumph and it has acquired a patina of charm over the ensuing decades. It was a good change of pace for Grant after all his screwball comedies of the era.

Thomas Mitchell, Victor Kilian, Sig Ruman, John Carroll, Allyn Joslyn and Noah Beery Jnr co-star.

Hawks had worked with Grant the year before on Bringing up Baby and this was the second of their five collaborations.

Years later Jean Arthur said: ‘I loved sinking my head into Cary Grant’s chest.’

Restored in 4K from the original nitrate picture negative and composite duplicate negative by Sony Pictures at Colorworks and shown at the 2014 London Film Festival and distributed in the UK by Park Circus. Digital image restored by MTI Film and sound by restored Chace Audio from the original nitrate sound negative.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1261

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/