Only Angels Have Wings

Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Columbia), directed by Howard Hawks, is a film I saw at the Museum of Modern Art when I first started looking at movies seriously.  It is fast-moving, intelligently written by Jules Furthman (who wrote a number of Von Sternberg films, as well as other Hawks films) and beautifully directed in the dialogue as well as the action scenes.  It can be seen as part of a series of civilian airplane films of the 30's (including John Ford's Air Mail, 1932) as well as a superb example of the Hawksian world, where men bond together in dangerous situations, while allowing women only if "they are good enough." 

Jean Arthur plays Bonnie and bonds with the men when she arrives in the South American town of Barranca just as Joe, a flyer for Geoff's (played by Cary Grant) airline crashes and Geoff eats the steak cooked for Joe.  When Bonnie complains that that was Joe's steak Geoff says, "What do you want me to do, stuff it?"  Bonnie works hard to suppress her emotions so she can be one of the boys, though even Geoff cries when his best friend, the Kid, dies in a crash. Things get intense when a former lover of Geoff's (played by a young Rita Hayworth) arrives on the scene with her disgraced current husband, who had jumped out of a plane and left the mechanic to die. But her husband redeems himself as a flyer and Bonnie stays with Geoff, though the future remains uncertain.

The film was shown at the estimable Film Forum in a restored 4K print, which is the highest resolution digital format,  In many ways the film looked gorgeous, with crisp blacks and whites and subtle shades of grey.  I still contend, however, that even the best digital restorations do not have quite the beauty and warmth of true 35 mm. film, just as compact disks don't have the warmth of vinyl, though I think this is a price we have to pay in order for these films to survive at all.  At least it's much better than the crummy 16 mm. dupes we once were regularly subjected to. 

When I first saw this film forty years ago I found the Hawksian world of professionalism appealing, but now it seems, at least in some ways, a retreat from responsibility; the world of Only Angels Have Wings is an isolated one.  I saw this film with my sixteen-year-old son who said, when I asked him, that he did not find some of the plot contrivances corny because they were so effectively done.  He also said he much prefers to see films in theatres because the best directors, such as Hawks, created their own worlds and that when one watches their films on TV one's own world can be a distraction.