Film review: Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

This one popped up new this month on the Criterion Channel, and we have a soft spot for all things Cary Grant, so we gave it a shot.  Mixed results.  It's directed by Howard Hawks and is sandwiched between classics Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, but it's not a comedy. Nor is Grant in his usual urbane urban suit-clad setting.  He wears a Panama hat and voluminous, incredibly high-wasted white trousers for much of the action, and it's just not him.

It doesn't help that it's a long film, the female lead is (a) not very impressive, and (b) doesn't have much to do, and the plot is very episodic.  It could have been better (and it's not terrible - although it doesn't deserve its 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and it has an incident that seems like its a precursor of Wages of Fear, as I will explain.  Grant plays the head honcho of a tiny flying company based in a fictional South American country, where he ferries the mail and occasionally delivers things to various mining companies, and picks people up to take to hospital.  (The Wages of Fear incident involves flying a crate of nitro glycerin, but it ends rather bathetically)  Jean Arthur stops off in his small town while on a cruise and falls for Grant, if only after watching one of his pilots crash and Grant act apparently callously.  (There's a lot of "the stoicism of men who face death" stuff in this film.) She was in some way the cause of the death (the pilot wanted dinner with her so insisted on landing in fog to get back in time) and later on manages to shoot Grant in the shoulder, so she's a bit of an Old Mariner's albatross in this film.  There are various subplots, such as a pilot who bailed on his engineer, whose brother is Grant's best friend, redeeming himself, and the visit of the woman (a young Rita Hayworth) who broke Grant's heart,

and a running thread of "the owner of the company needs to deliver the mail without fail for three months straight to win a commission" but it's mostly about the relationships among the men.  Grant's sidekick is a familiar face and is very appealing, but it wasn't really my cup of tea.  The role would have suited Bogart better.  Some good aerial action, though.