Watching a silent 1927 movie and flying an airplane have something in common. They both take a little getting used to. This is a pretty good movie about the US Air Service in World War I.
(Kids, that means 1918. The airplanes are so old they're funny. They have two wings and they're not bent backwards. You'll laugh. But, on the plus side, they don't serve peanut snacks, so your Mom doesn't have to worry about allergies.) Rogers and Arlen have grown up together and are best friends, though they happen to be in love with the same girl, Clara Bow. Arlen thinks she loves him, but she really loves Rogers, but Bow and Rogers keep it a secret from Arlen because they don't want to hurt his feelings or something and meanwhile -- the viewer pendiculates.
The movie gets off the ground when the two buddies get to jab their elbows in each others' ribs while going through flight training. There's something a little odd about that friendship, by the way. I see no reason to get into it too deeply but when one dies in the other's arms and they're confessing their mutual adoration I thought they were going to have one last great big French kiss. There IS a kiss but it's on the cheek, an expression of comradeship, and after all this is France. Of course, the director, William Wellman, might be willing to tackle such an unusual homoerotic theme but it would never be allowed on the screen. A highly stereotypical ethnic -- Herman Schrimpf -- yes, but not the love that dare not speak its name.
I don't want to give the ending away. That's not usually the case but here the resolution of the plot is both important and ironic. What isn't surprising is the climax of the love affair. The minute that I saw these two rivals for the girl's hand march off to war, I wondered which of them would be the survivor.
It is, as I say, a pretty good movie. The affair with Bow is handled tactfully and doesn't take up an inordinate amount of time. It's a long movie, though, and one scene could have been condensed or even eliminated without too much trouble. I refer to the longish scene in the café in Paris where Rogers gets loaded and carries on about the champagne bubbles he's hallucinating. It seems like an excuse for an exercise in contemporary photographic legerdemain -- all those bubbles coming out of nowhere and floating towards the ceiling.
Willaim Wellman was quite a character, full of "thumos", as the Greeks would have called it. A spirited youngster from an aristocratic Boston background he wound up flying in combat in the Lafayette Squadron in France, winning the Croix de Guerre, so he knows whereof he directs. And the air combat scenes are very good indeed. And some aerial shots give us panoramic displays of the battlefield itself, full of zig-zagging trenches, craters, and lines of barbed wire. I don't know how much money the movie cost but it must have been more than my own salary. Or yours. The acting is unexceptional, hemmed in as it is by the strictures of silent film making. At one point, I'm reasonably certain, an angry Rogers looks into the camera and clearly says, "Bastards!" Wellman would easily have been capable of that.
He was always more of a craftsman than an artist but he tackled some startling subjects, as in "Wild Boys Of The Road," and sometimes produced some truly sensitive and underplayed work, as in, "The Story of G. I. Joe." Nice job here.
(Kids, that means 1918. The airplanes are so old they're funny. They have two wings and they're not bent backwards. You'll laugh. But, on the plus side, they don't serve peanut snacks, so your Mom doesn't have to worry about allergies.) Rogers and Arlen have grown up together and are best friends, though they happen to be in love with the same girl, Clara Bow. Arlen thinks she loves him, but she really loves Rogers, but Bow and Rogers keep it a secret from Arlen because they don't want to hurt his feelings or something and meanwhile -- the viewer pendiculates.
The movie gets off the ground when the two buddies get to jab their elbows in each others' ribs while going through flight training. There's something a little odd about that friendship, by the way. I see no reason to get into it too deeply but when one dies in the other's arms and they're confessing their mutual adoration I thought they were going to have one last great big French kiss. There IS a kiss but it's on the cheek, an expression of comradeship, and after all this is France. Of course, the director, William Wellman, might be willing to tackle such an unusual homoerotic theme but it would never be allowed on the screen. A highly stereotypical ethnic -- Herman Schrimpf -- yes, but not the love that dare not speak its name.
I don't want to give the ending away. That's not usually the case but here the resolution of the plot is both important and ironic. What isn't surprising is the climax of the love affair. The minute that I saw these two rivals for the girl's hand march off to war, I wondered which of them would be the survivor.
It is, as I say, a pretty good movie. The affair with Bow is handled tactfully and doesn't take up an inordinate amount of time. It's a long movie, though, and one scene could have been condensed or even eliminated without too much trouble. I refer to the longish scene in the café in Paris where Rogers gets loaded and carries on about the champagne bubbles he's hallucinating. It seems like an excuse for an exercise in contemporary photographic legerdemain -- all those bubbles coming out of nowhere and floating towards the ceiling.
Willaim Wellman was quite a character, full of "thumos", as the Greeks would have called it. A spirited youngster from an aristocratic Boston background he wound up flying in combat in the Lafayette Squadron in France, winning the Croix de Guerre, so he knows whereof he directs. And the air combat scenes are very good indeed. And some aerial shots give us panoramic displays of the battlefield itself, full of zig-zagging trenches, craters, and lines of barbed wire. I don't know how much money the movie cost but it must have been more than my own salary. Or yours. The acting is unexceptional, hemmed in as it is by the strictures of silent film making. At one point, I'm reasonably certain, an angry Rogers looks into the camera and clearly says, "Bastards!" Wellman would easily have been capable of that.
He was always more of a craftsman than an artist but he tackled some startling subjects, as in "Wild Boys Of The Road," and sometimes produced some truly sensitive and underplayed work, as in, "The Story of G. I. Joe." Nice job here.