There is not much value in getting nostalgic for how the ultrarich used to live. Yes, they seemed to have better taste, with their ornate mansions that still stand today and often serve as museums or tourist destinations, as well as their patronage to the arts. But at the same time, a billionaire is still a billionaire. And if we’re adjusting for inflation while talking about the ultra-wealthy of the early 20th century, a millionaire is still a millionaire.
That said, there is something about the image of maverick aviation pioneer Howard Hughes risking his life against the wishes of his stunt coordinator to film one of the marvelous plane combat scenes in 1930’s Hell’s Angels. It was a stunt so dangerous that Hughes crashed his plane and had to have facial surgery, which was immortalized in the 2004 film The Aviator. It’s the type of thing you’d be hard-pressed to imagine one of today’s billionaire tech turds attempting, let alone having the attention span to craft a piece of long-form storytelling, even one that mostly aims to thrill and amaze you. So with that all said, I have to give Mr. Hughes begrudging respect for pulling off one of the more entertaining movies of the early sound era I can remember seeing.
Hell’s Angels was a film made right at the turn of talkies going into production, first conceived as a silent film, but then was reworked to be a full-on sound film, and you can tell in places. Most apparently in the way that the film has the very silent-era device of using intertitle cards instead of subtitles when characters are speaking another language. Which makes for an odd dynamic of the film cutting away to text on a blank screen in the middle of a scene. The film is also unmistakably an early talkie in that it feels very much like a pre-Hayes Code film with its spicy subject matter.
You see this most apparently in the different personalities of the film’s two main characters, a pair of brothers named Monte (Ben Lyon) and Roy (James Hall). Monte is a really lethario, while the more uptight Roy is highly dedicated to his girlfriend Helen (Jean Harlow). We meet the two brothers when they’re hanging around in a bar with some friends in Munich, not knowing the Great War is just a few gunshots away. Later that night, we see Monte getting frisky on the couch with a young woman before we find out that her husband is a German officer. After the German officer challenges Monte to a duel, he scurries out of the house, and after being mistaken for his brother, the more honorable Roy ends up engaging in the duel and getting shot in the process, but manages to survive.
Not long after that, the war breaks out, which sees both Monte and Roy enlisting in the British Royal Air Force, while their German friend Karl (John Darrow) ends up fighting on the other side of things. Not long after this, Roy introduces Monte to Helen and there’s a certain spark between the two of them, which doesn’t take long to materialize since both of them seem to be the type of people who like to sleep around. This results in one night where Helen takes Monte back to her room and the two share a very long kiss, but things don’t go any further than that because Monte feels guilty about betraying Roy.
We get our first captivating aerial combat sequence when the two brothers must take down a German-manned zeppelin that their friend Karl happens to be on. One of their fellow pilots eventually turns the mission to one of the kamikaze variety, crashing his plane into the zeppelin, causing it to burst into flames and crash. This results in Monte and Roy having to run away from the crash after landing their plane, resulting in a very early example of the action movie cliché of a film having their heroes run away from a giant explosion.
After this, Roy and Monte are out at a bar when they catch Helen canoodling with another man, which Roy is only mildly surprised by since Monte vaguely warned him earlier that she might not be faithful. This more or less puts an end to Roy and Helen’s relationship right before Roy and Monte get assigned to a suicide mission where they’re supposed to blow up a German munitions factory while flying in the guise of one of the German’s own Red Baron-esque planes. This sets the stage for the film’s focal climactic dogfight scene, where we see the boys complete their mission by blowing up the right depots, but they eventually crash and are captured by the Germans. In their imprisonment, they must then make some choices over whether to betray their country, betray each other, or face death.
I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on Howard Hughes, but for what I do know about the man, Hell’s Angels does feel like a fitting film for him to debut his directorial skills. Obviously, the man was crazy about airplanes, so it’s not surprising that he would make a film that would benefit from his aviation expertise. However, the film also seems to embody Hughes penchant for glamorous women and loose morals as well, as the film’s spicy subject matter revolving around people having casual affairs without being vehemently punished for it feels very much like a product of the pre-Code era. I would also say this risqué subject matter is what makes the film’s dramatic scenes somewhat interesting even though they undeniably pale in comparison to the flight sequences.
These talking scenes (which actually make up a fair amount of the film) were actually directed by future Universal horror icon James Whale, who at the time was practically an unknown, with this essentially being his directorial debut. While the performances by Ben Lyon and James Hall are a tad bit too theatrical, it can be forgiven considering how early this was in the silent era and the fact that the scenes are never terribly static or awkward. You can tell that Jean Harlow is a little green, seeing as this was her first juicy role and she was only 18 at the time, but she certainly has a kind of star quality that was subsequently rewarded with a prolific leading lady run that would tragically be cut short by her death at the age of 26 in 1937.
Though as you might expect from Hughes, the real stars of this show are the planes. The aerial combat scene that serves as the climax of the film is quite simply one of the more thrilling action sequences I can recall seeing. Nothing in the sequence feels fake because it wasn’t. Hughes insisted on using all real planes to do these intricate formations and flying patterns in a way that feels strangely visceral even today. It’s the type of thing where you have to marvel at the man’s hubris, not only because he flew in one of the film’s most dangerous stunts (which his principal stunt pilot Paul Mantz said was too dangerous to film), but also because there just was no other way of doing it. The sequence is also an example of it actually being a benefit that early talkies didn’t use a ton of non-diegetic music, as the sequence has no score, just adding to the gripping, naturalistic quality of the sequence.
Additionally, it’s just kind of insane to think that both airplanes and movies themselves where only about 30 years old at the time, and Hughes was trying to combine the two to make something spectacular. Overall, I would not say this is a perfect film, but it’s one that held up much better than I was expecting, considering I’ve never really heard it declared one of the great movies of the 1930s, perhaps because the guy who directed it wasn’t a film director primarily. While the rest of Hughes’ career in Hollywood seemed to be marred by various ups and downs, Hell’s Angels was the type of reckless triumph that only a madman like Hughes could pull off.