by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the TCM showing of the 1933 film Night Flight, a movie far less well known than it deserves to
be because Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the novel on which it was based,
hated the movie so much that when the rights reverted to him in 1942 (like
Rafael Sabatini with Bardelys the Magnificent, he had merely leased, not sold outright, the film rights to MGM), he
refused to renew them, so the film remained in legal limbo until recently
(though for a movie that supposedly couldn’t legally be shown for decades after
it was made, it certainly has a lot of reviews on imdb.com — 12, the earliest
dating to 2003 — and it’s marked as “Print Viewed” in the American Film
Institute Catalog). David O. Selznick,
recently arrived at MGM after he’d walked out of his job as RKO studio head
because of interference from the radio executives at RKO’s parent company (and,
since he was married to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, he had to face all the usual
nepotism jokes, of which the most famous was, “The Son-in-Law Also Rises”), had
just produced the all-star extravaganza Dinner at Eight as his first MGM film and had a major hit. So he
decided to do another all-star production — a kind of movie that was actually
quite practical under the studio system because the various actors could shoot
their scenes for it in between work on other films — and use Saint-Exupéry’s
1931 Prix Femina-winning novel (a fact that needless to say did not go
unmentioned in the titles!) as the basis for one, with the result that we get
images of the major stars in the film — John and Lionel Barrymore, Helen Hayes,
Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy — even before the main title (and
when the main title comes on it’s made to look like it’s been skywritten).
Robert Osborne, in introducing the TCM showing (which he said was the film’s
world television premiere), said that he couldn’t think of an instance in which
a writer had publicly said he or she actually liked a film based on one of their works (I can: Annie
Proulx on Brokeback Mountain in 2005), and admitted that a film that’s been unseeable for years
because the author of the source material hated it is going to go back into the
world with a strike or two against it. Surprise: Night Flight is actually an excellent film, suffering a bit
from a certain stiffness in the execution but overall a gripping piece of
drama, expertly directed by Clarence Brown, ably written by Oliver H. P.
Garrett (not a specialist in aviation
films, though one writer who was famous for movies about flying, John Monk Saunders, did some uncredited
work on the script, as did Wells Root) and shot by cinematographer Oliver T.
Marsh in a surprisingly dark, chiaroscuro style for an MGM film, especially an MGM film made a decade and a half
before the heyday of film noir.
The plot revolves around the recently formed Trans-Andean European Air
Mail service (based on Aeropostale Argentina, the real South American airline
Saint-Exupéry had flown for, which eventually merged and became part of Air France) on the day it starts flying by night — a long-time
dream of its general manager, Riviére (John Barrymore in an astonishing
performance quite different from his norm — he’s neither a romantic leading man
nor a monster, but a neurotically driven CEO who’s determined to make the night
flights a success no matter how high the cost in human lives or equipment), who
argues that air mail loses its speed advantage over trains or ships whenever
the sun goes down because those conveyances travel by night and planes don’t.
(The opening credits make a big deal of the fact that the action of this movie
takes place over a single day: not many producers in 1933, or since, have
ballyhooed their scripts’ adherence even to one of the Aristotlean unities!) Among his pilots are
Jules Fabian (Clark Gable), Auguste Pellerin (Robert Montgomery) and someone
identified in the cast listings simply as “Brazilian pilot” (William Gargan),
who shows up for his first night flight already drunk and nearly loses his plane
when the effects of the alcohol start catching up with him in mid-air. Lionel
Barrymore plays the so-called “inspector,” Robineau, who thinks Riviére is
driving the pilots too hard and wants him to ease up and act more human —
apparently there was a good deal of real-life antagonism and jealousy between
the Barrymore brothers (Lionel envied John’s matinee-idol good looks and
successes with women, and John envied Lionel’s reputation among producers and
critics for being the more “serious” actor of the two — Boris Karloff, who
worked with both Barrymores, told one biographer that Lionel was “a much better
actor than his brother John”) that producers and directors eagerly tapped in
their films together — and the two women are involved in the action through the
men: Helen Hayes plays Fabian’s wife Simone, and Myrna Loy is married to the
Brazilian pilot played by Gargan but also works at a bar as a “B”-girl and,
it’s strongly hinted in that sly way of the so-called “pre-Code” era, a
prostitute who, in the film’s most sexually audacious scene, picks up Pellerin
as one of her tricks. (But he’s called away to the airport to start a flight
before anything down-’n’-dirty can happen.)
The star cast isn’t always deployed
as well as we might expect — for some reason (possibly due to the fact that the
film was previewed at 112 minutes but cut to 84 minutes for release) William
Gargan gets more screen time than either Robert Montgomery or Clark Gable, and
Gable is virtually unrecognizable because all his scenes take place inside the
cockpit of a plane (he’s supposedly married to Helen Hayes but we never see them together) and he barely gets any dialogue
beyond a few terse instructions to the radio man Guimet (Leslie Fenton) who’s
flying with him, which he has to grunt over the noise of the plane. (Myrna Loy,
in her autobiography, said she never met Gable, Hayes or John Barrymore on the
set, and she rebelled at being given yet another role as a woman of loose
morals — her regular typecasting until she got Louis B. Mayer to cast her as
William Powell’s wife in The Thin Man and thereby got re-“typed” in the salty but decent good-woman roles she
wanted.) But what’s wrong with Night Flight pales by comparison to what’s right with it:
Brown’s direction is utterly gripping, the aerial scenes (particularly one in
which a pilot has to maneuver his plane through a mountain pass) are
astonishing, and the visual atmospherics are properly dark and brooding. A
number of the imdb.com reviewers negatively compared this to Howard Hawks’ film
Only Angels Have Wings, made six
years later and also about an airmail line in South America (and with Cary
Grant, of all people, cast in the equivalent of John Barrymore’s role here),
but though Hawks (as usual) gives stronger roles to the women in his cast (Jean
Arthur and Rita Hayworth), he also saddles the story with his penchant for
Hemingwayesque depictions of “grace under pressure” that takes the edge off the
visceral thrills. At least one imdb.com reviewer faulted the addition of a plot
line in which a (typically obnoxiously cute) movie kid is dying of polio in a
hospital in Rio and his survival depends on the night-flight airline getting a
serum there from Chile before noon — which took the edge off one of
Saint-Exupéry’s more cynical lines, to the effect that the pilots were running
all these insane risks just so a Frenchwoman could get a postcard on Tuesday
instead of Thursday — but I thought that plot device worked and underscored the
importance of the main action and the fact that advancing humanity’s reach in
the skies really did matter.
Night
Flight suffers from Helen Hayes’
overacting — it’s true she’s playing the wife of a pilot who gets killed during
the course of the story, and it’s equally true that after The Sin of Madelon
Claudet, Arrowsmith and A Farewell to Arms Hollywood thought of her only in tear-jerker roles (here her big scene is she
prepares a lavish dinner for her pilot husband, planning to serve it when he
arrives home, then freaks out when she realizes he isn’t coming back on time,
then goes to the airport when she realizes the odds are all too good that he
isn’t coming back … ever), and Brown either couldn’t or wouldn’t turn down her
relentless assault on the tear ducts the way her previous directors Edgar
Selwyn, John Ford and Frank Borzage had (within two years Hayes would quit
films and return to the stage, where she could get away with this sort of
scenery-chewing far more easily) — but when it’s in the air, or it’s on the
ground with the Barrymore brothers, the board of directors running the airline
(who want Riviére to pull back on the night flights lest too many disasters
give aviation in general a bad name) and the people working the radio and
trying as best they can to keep track of where the planes are and where the storms
they need to avoid are as well, Night Flight is absolutely gripping drama and well worth seeing.
If nothing else, it viscerally demonstrates just how preposterous flying was in
those days, especially in those crude biplanes that were basically giant kites
with motors, propellers and ailerons stuck on them (it’s not clear just how
much control the pilots really had over them, or whether “flying by
instruments” — relying on one’s dashboard gauges to determine where one is without
being able to see where one
is going — was even possible back then given how primitive the available instruments were), and how
much vision it took to realize that someday those crude contraptions would be
succeeded by the sleek airliners of today, which have made night flying as routine
and unexceptional as night driving.
