Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Directed by Howard Hawks

Nowadays, we expect to be able to communicate with people across the world in an instant, bouncing signals off satellites at near the speed of light. It requires an act of imagination for us to try to remember what it was like to get letters, not just news from a business partner on another continent, but words from people you love, words they might have weighed in their hearts long before the pen dared to touch the paper. So when airplanes began their service to deliver the mail — as they still do! — it changed the world. What is an ocean but a puddle? What is a mountain range but an anthill?

I know it’s not so — it still requires much skill to fly over the Andes, or the Atlantic. But no one can doubt that we simply expect mail to be delivered, with speed. Back in the days of Herodotus, that historian and much-traveled observer of commonwealths and kingdoms had this to say about the postmen of the Persian Empire: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” That was a handsome tribute to the efficiency of Greece’s enemy. The architect of the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue, which opened in 1918, had it carved upon the new building’s frieze above the Corinthian columns, and the line was cherished so dearly that people thought it was the official motto of the United States Postal Service. It isn’t, but there was still a great deal of adventure and romance in delivering the mail, and that in fact is what our Film of the Week, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), is about.

Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) is the manager of a small, well, fly-by-night air mail service in South America, and he’s trying his hardest, and pushing his fellow pilots to the limit, to secure a government contract which will set the company up for sure success. The thing is, the route he and they have mostly to use takes them through a pass in the Andes, and the weather in that part of the world during the rainy season can be quite variable, what with two oceans nearby, one rather warm (the Atlantic) and one quite cold (the Pacific), not to mention the effects of the tropical latitudes and the great height of the peaks. You may have read Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novel Night Flight (1931): it is set in Argentina, and it too involves the sacrifice of the men who fly the postal delivery planes to the greatness of their cause. We get some of that idealism also in Only Angels Have Wings, but the heart of the movie is love: for Geoff, against his inclinations, falls in love with a singer who has just recently arrived at their port town, and she, Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), against her inclinations, falls in love with him. I suppose that women are attracted to men who do dangerous but necessary things, though they often wish they could lay down those jobs and do something else instead.

The complications in Only Angels Have Wings are both personal and logistical. This work in bad weather will require you to set safety aside and put your life on the line, yet the men do it — and one of them, Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess), has gotten a bad reputation back in America for having bailed out of a plane to leave his mechanic to die. That mechanic was the brother of “Kid” Dabb, Geoff’s elder friend and fellow pilot, played by the many-talented character actor Thomas Mitchell, whose work we’ve often featured at Word and Song: for instance, in another film with a problematic air flight in it, Lost Horizon. Bat has that tag of the coward to live down, or to triumph over. The trial period for the government contract is nearing its end, and all looks well, when the storms come, and Geoff must decide what to do. And let us say that what to do means also what to do with Bonnie, and she must also decide; because if she stays with him, if she marries him, gone are the happy-go-lucky days on ships, singing before rich and pleasant crowds.

As always, we don’t do spoilers here. Trust us on this one: it is not your usual hero-film. Cary Grant, whom I consider the greatest comic actor in Hollywood history, could do dramatic parts just as well, and there was something about his manner that I think made it seem to people that he was just being himself, not “acting.” In other words, even though he was one of the two or three most popular leading men over a course of about twenty five years, I think he was underrated even at that. Then there is the winsome, sprightly Jean Arthur, whose innocent ways overlay a deep and natural capacity for feeling. You never sense that there is anything artificial about her. Only Angels Have Wings is the breakout film for Rita Hayworth, and we mustn’t forget about Noah Beery, Jr., the genial Dad “Rocky” in The Rockford Files. Most of all, we’ve got Howard Hawks, the great director, himself a flight instructor in World War I, and Hawks’ keen sense of the emotions that bring together brothers-in-arms, whether it’s in war or out west or, as here, in the skies below the Equator.

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