Wings of the Hawk (Universal-International, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I made the mistake of running a 1953 Universal-International 3-D movie, Budd Boetticher’s Wings of the Hawk (though the movie has nothing to do with wings or hawks and the only bird reference is a non-specified species the principal villain keeps as a pet and allows to roost on his shoulder). I had previously got this on Blu-Ray in an edition that ballyhooed a major restoration by the 3-D Film Archive, but when I ordered the disc from Amazon.com it didn’t come with 3-D glasses. I tried to run it in 2-D but couldn’t figure out how to get the alternate version to show, so I ordered two pair of glasses (also from Amazon.com) and Charles and I tried to watch it last night. The problem was that the alleged 3-D effects were awful; the left and right images didn’t even come close to a proper resolution. At first I thought it was a problem with my eyes; I wondered if the artificial lenses implanted in my eyes after my cataract surgeries weren’t capable of focusing well enough to get the 3-D effects in this movie. Then my husband Charles told me that he was seeing the same sorts of blurry, out-of-register images I was. I briefly considered stopping the movie and switching to the 2-D version but decided to stick it out. I suspect Wings of the Hawk was actually a better movie than the one we experienced last night, in which we kept hoping that the actors would move closer to the camera because at least the close shots made them look like normal people. When the film cut to long shots we got the ghosting effect like those we used to see on black-and-white televisions when the over-the-air reception wasn’t good enough to give a clean image. I had bought Wings of the Hawk in the first place because it was listed on imdb.com as the first film by Pedro González González, who had his 15 minutes of fame when he appeared as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life. Groucho found it irresistibly hilarious that his family name and his matronymic were the same, and John Wayne signed him to a contract as a character actor. He was in the High Sierra remake, I Died a Thousand Times (1955), playing a stereotypical Mexican servant, but his role in Wings of the Hawk, “Tomás,” was more interesting and nuanced.

The film takes place in 1910 on the eve of the Mexican Revolution; Porfirio Diáz is still in power, but revolutionaries are mobilizing for his overthrow – and one actual Mexican revolutionary, Pascual Orozco (Noah Beery, Jr., whose uncle Wallace Beery had played Pancho Villa in MGM’s 1934 Mexican Revolution movie ¡Viva Villa!), is a character in the film. The lead actor is Van Heflin, playing Gallagher, nicknamed “Irish” (if he has a real first name, we don’t learn what it is), who’s just opened a gold mine in the Mexican state of Chihuahua along the U.S. border with New Mexico and Arizona. He’s getting a shakedown from the Chihuahua state governor, Col. Paco Ruiz (George Dolenz, father of future Monkee Micky Dolenz), who has risen through the ranks – Gallagher grimly jokes, “The last time I met you, you were just a captain. You’ll probably be a general next time” – thanks to Diáz’s favoritism. Col. Ruiz demands half of the mine’s income, and when Gallagher refuses, Ruiz orders his troops to seize the mine and throw Gallagher off it altogether. Ruiz also kills Gallagher’s Mexican business partner. Bereft of an income, Gallagher throws in with the local revolutionaries who are organizing against the Díaz regime, including “The General,” who turns out to be a woman, Raquel Noriega (Julia Adams). Raquel was wounded in a firefight with Ruiz’s men, who previously murdered her parents and kidnapped her sister Elena (Abbe Lane, best known as a singer and TV personality rather than an actress). Ruiz made Elena his mistress, and when Orozco’s army invades Ruiz’s home and tries to take her back, Elena has a big-time case of the Stockholm Syndrome and refuses to leave. The fancy dresses Ruiz has bought her with some of the money he’s stealing from the Mexican people have helped cement her loyalty to him, and when the two sisters confront each other Raquel acidly says, “I wish you had bought that dress.”

Eventually Orozco decides to stage a raid on the border town of Ciudad Juárez (the real Orozco did that, too, contrary to the orders of the leader he was presumably fighting for, Francisco Madero, and it was a key turning point in the Mexican Revolution even though Orozco became disillusioned with Madero’s leadership and, along with Pancho Villa, turned against him), for which he needs guns. Gallagher proposes to break into his old gold mine and steal the gold, with which Orozco can purchase guns in the U.S. (these days Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people to the U.S. for guns since Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and we don’t). Realizing that the key to Orozco’s success is blocking Ruiz from being able to bring his own troops to the city to bolster the Diáz government’s defense, Gallagher ultimately blows up his own gold mine to block their way, so Van Heflin’s character does a Bogart-style arc from indifferent opportunist to dedicated patriot. The film’s debt to the Bogart oeuvre in general and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (another tale of opportunistic Americans in Mexico who mine a fortune in gold and then lose it all) in particular is pretty obvious, but Wings of the Hawk is actually a quite good, tough melodrama if you can stomach the awful 3-D effects. Afterwards Charles and I screened some of the bonus items on the disc, including the film’s theatrical trailer as well as a Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Hypnotic Hick, which we chose to watch in 2-D rather than subject ourselves to any more wildly out-of-register images allegedly reproducing 3-D. Hypnotic Hick turned out to be a quite delightful short film with some really spectacular effects and an overall good humor; it was reminiscent of the Road Runner cartoons from Warner Bros. even though Woody Woodpecker, unlike the Road Runner, actually spoke.