Hell's Angels (1930)
This is the film that started my Century of Cinema project. It's an epic featuring two English brothers, their German friend, a blonde bombshell, a war, a Zeppelin, and lots of expensive aerial footage of planes and dogfights.
Roy and Monte (James Hall and Ben Lyon) are brothers with opposite personalities. Roy is a nice-but-dim honourable chap, Monte is something of a cad. Roy is loyal, sensitive and a bit of a doormat. Monte is a womaniser. The film opens with the brothers in Germany, visiting their friend Karl (John Darrow). Monte gets caught in the arms of a Baron's wife... by the Baron. The Baron challenges him to a duel. Monte decides to go home to Oxford instead, leaving Roy in Germany to take his place in the duel. He gets shot in his arm. Roy and Karl return to Oxford and the three have a jolly time with their chums.
Their japes don't last long. Disrupting proceedings is the outbreak of the Great War. Karl gets called up and must return to Germany. The brothers join the Royal Flying Corps - Roy voluntarily and Monte via a girl selling kisses outside an enrollment office. Silly cad.
Roy is infatuated with Helen (Jean Harlow in her breakthrough role). At a ball, Roy introduces his beloved Helen to Monte. It's clear that Helen has an instant attraction to Monte, mostly by the strange way she stares psychotically at him when they first meet. Within seconds of getting a moment to themselves, Helen and Monte are kissing like teenagers at a school disco. She invites him back to her place, asks if he minds if she slips into something more comfortable (is that where the saying comes from?) and, despite Monte having a brief crisis of conscience for roughly a millisecond, he decides to sleep with his brother's girl. The evil cad.
Monte tries to warn Roy away from Helen. Roy doesn't want to hear it. And then the movie becomes a war film as the action ramps up, and the screen turns blue. Literally. Back then, they turned a black and white movie into a colour one by sticking a coloured filter over the film.
There's an excellent Zeppelin scene, with a harrowing solution to a problem with it being too heavy. There's a scene where Monte rants about the futility of war, and how it is nothing other than people killing other people on behalf of leaders and politicians. The ranty cad. And while politicians and leaders continue to have spats and disagreements with each other, it's an argument that'll continue for centuries to come. And there's a daring attempt by the brothers to enter territory and destroy a munitions store - essentially a suicide mission. It ends with an interesting dilemma.
Much of the second half of the film features footage of warplanes in aerial combat. This isn't archive footage, it was filmed specifically for the movie. They helped to ramp up the costs of the film, causing it to be the most expensive made up to that point. The scenes are impressive even today, capturing the realism of dogfights and feeling a lot more authentic than more modern films do. It's surreal to think that the First World War had ended just over a decade earlier.
The film was so ambitious and took so long to make, that the movie industry's transition from silent movies to talking pictures happened during its production. It was released as a talking picture, but there's lots of evidence of its roots as a silent movie. Some of the scenes are acted out very much in the tradition of silent movie (lots of gestures, waving of hands, etc.), while others clearly had voices dubbed over them. There are even interstitials before certain scenes, as it seems that movie makers at the time hadn't quite grasped how talking pictures needed to be presented. As for acting, actors had a strange mid-Atlantic accent and unnatural way of speaking their lines. Yep, it was very early days for talkies, and it shows. Jean Harlow is entertaining in it - it looks like she fell into the part quite naturally.
The film is a great watch even today. It's high cost meant it had high production values, largely helped by Howard Hughes' obsession with perfection and accuracy. It's over 90 years old, but Hell's Angels still soars - planes, cads, doormats and all.