by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Men Against the Sky, which I’d recorded from Turner Classic Movies
during a recent evening tribute to its star, Richard Dix, who by the time it
was made — 1940 — was on the downgrade. RKO was mostly using him in “B”
rehashes of his great successes from earlier in the 1930’s, in films like The
Arizonian and Reno that were basically reworkings of Cimarron and The Conquerors (a title that just says “banking,” which is the
subject of the movie) and in stuff like this, an aviation movie that blatantly
rehashes much better films Dix had made before it, The Lost Squadron and Ace of Aces, which TCM showed immediately after Men Against the Sky. Basically, Men Against the Sky is a pretty standard aviation movie which begins in
a carnival, with Dix as barnstorming stunt pilot Phil Mercedes (his last name,
incidentally, is pronounced “MER-suh-dees” instead of “Mur-SAY-dees,” like the
car), who takes people up for $10 a pop (a pretty dated plot point in 1940 when
commercial aviation was sufficiently well developed that anyone who really wanted to fly could do so in the comfort and relative
safety of an airliner) until one of them gets out of the plane, complains that
the pilot is drunk, and tells the waiting crowd that if they want to continue
living the last thing they will
do is get in that plane. Phil is fired on the spot, and responds by stealing
the plane, doing some spectacular stunt flying (the great Paul Mantz is
credited as technical adviser but I suspect he did most of the spectacular
piloting seen in the film) and crashing the thing into a nearby barn. As a
result, the Civil Aeronautics Board (remember the Civil Aeronautics Board? No particular
reason why you should, except that it was dissolved during the Carter
administration, a reminder that the deregulatory mania of the 1980’s and 1990’s
was bipartisan) “grounds” Phil — i.e., takes away his pilot’s license — for one
year, and Phil’s sister Kay (Wendy Barrie), with whom he lives, gets a job as
draftsperson for the McLean aviation company.
The owner, Dan McLean (Edmund
Lowe), is attempting to build a prototype for a new fighter plane so he can win
a contract being offered by unspecified foreign powers for a plane with which
they can shoot down bombers — an odd plot device reflecting that this film was
made after World War II had started but before the U.S. was in it. He’s also
being distracted by a mistress, Miss LcClair (Jane Woodworth), but oddly little
is made of that — in most aviation movies the mistress would turn out to be an
industrial spy for a company competing for the contract with McLean, but
writers John Twist (story) and Nathanael West (screenplay) — yes,
that Nathanael West, author of Miss
Lonelyhearts and The Day of the
Locust — tap into a lot of aviation-movie
clichés but don’t do the vamp
stealing industrial secrets and/or taking McLean’s attention away from the
contract and thereby allowing a competitor to win. (We are told that the initial seed capital for McLean’s
company came from the rich woman he married, which makes it look even sleazier
that he’s having an affair on her.) Instead Kay — using the last name “Green”
so she won’t be linked with the once-honored, now-disgraced pilot who’s her
brother — gets a job in the office of Martin Ames (Kent Taylor), McLean’s chief
designer, and she sneaks some suggestions for the new plane’s design to Martin,
not telling him that they’re actually the work of her brother. When a model of
the plane is tested in a wind tunnel (a piece of hardware that’s basic to
actual airplane manufacture but hardly ever appears in a film about aviation)
and its wings shear off, Phil figures out how to fix the problem: by putting
little flaps on the wing that will be up when it takes off and lands but will
close for a smoother wing surface during actual flight. Alas, when the
full-scale prototype is ready for testing, the test pilot, Dick Allerton
(Donald Briggs), has a jealous hissy-fit when he makes a pass at Kay and
Martin, who predictably has progressed from hate-at-first-sight to love of her,
punches him out.
Allerton gets his revenge by refusing to do the nine-G dive
that was part of the contract specs (depicted in the film by the plane heading
straight down at a chilling 90° angle to the earth’s surface) and reporting
that the plane is unsafe. Phil, who’s on the ground watching the test,
immediately goes up to prove that the plane is safe, violating his one-year CAB suspension. Alas,
the plane really isn’t safe — it
crashes, Phil bails out and the plane emerges a flaming wreck, and by flying in
violation of his suspension Phil gets grounded for life. (At this point one
wonders why he doesn’t go to South America and fly mail planes under a false name
à la Only Angels Have Wings.)
Phil figures out what’s wrong with the plane — one of the flaps was cut across
one of the wooden spars used as a frame for the wing, thereby weakening the
spar and causing it to shred in mid-air — and, with the financial support of an
unscrupulous backer (Granville Bates) who gives McLean venture capital on such
tough terms he seems like the prototype for Mitt Romney, they build another
plane and a U.S. Navy pilot, Captain Wallen (Lee Bonnell, who was the co-winner
of that talent contest with Gale Storm which won them both RKO contracts, but who’s barely in the film except
inside a dummy cockpit), comes out to test it. The plane passes all its tests
but its landing gear gets stuck, half-down and half-up, and though McLean and
Martin Ames plead with the U.S. Navy that’s supervising the test that the
landing gear are a standard component and all the new stuff in the plane has worked, Navy Captain Sanders
(Selmer Jackson) insists that the plane cannot be allowed into production
unless it lands safely and in one piece. Accordingly, Phil Mercedes rides to
the rescue again, intending to go up in another plane (with someone else
actually flying it so he doesn’t break his CAB “grounding” again), push the
landing gear open manually, and parachute to safety — he fixes the landing gear
but the parachute shreds on the little wheel at the end of the plane, so Phil falls to his death, though as
if he were an operatic lead he holds on long enough to bless the union of his
sister Kay to Martin Ames before he expires. (I can think of at least two
operas about aviation: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s adaptation of Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight and
one Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht came up with, originally called Lindbergh’s
Flight in honor of what they thought was a
major triumph of the 20th century, only later in a typical political
snit Brecht changed the title to Ocean Flight after Lindbergh became an apologist for Nazi
Germany.)
The final scene is a knockoff of the ending of The Lost Squadron, in which Richard Dix is seen as a ghost, flying the
new plane off into the skies, represented by negative film to indicate that
he’s dead (in The Lost Squadron
both Dix and Robert Armstrong, representing burned-out World War I pilots
reduced to working for mad moviemaker Erich von Stroheim, fly across the sky in
negative film to indicate that the “lost” squadron is still together even if
two of its members are dead). Plotwise, Men Against the Sky is pretty much a rehash of the Aviation Movie 101 clichés,
though with just enough variations to make it interesting, and the most
fascinating factoid about it is what plane “played” the McLean prototype: the
H-1 Racer, designed, financed, built and flown by Howard Hughes in 1935. The
H-1 was the first plane ever
built with retractable landing gear (which may explain why they look so crude
on screen), and Hughes also invented a system to make the rivets holding its
metal skin onto the frame flush so there wouldn’t be rivet heads sticking up,
offering wind resistance and slowing his super-plane down. Indeed, the film
apparently contains stock footage of Hughes’ actual flight in the H-1 in 1935,
during which he flew cross-country across the U.S. faster than anyone had
before (thereby breaking a record Hughes had set himself flying in the other
direction in someone else’s plane). The fact that Howard Hughes appeared — albeit by proxy — in an RKO movie eight years
before he bought the studio himself adds to the ironic appeal of Men
Against the Sky.
