Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 166: Thu June 15

Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.30pm

This 4K presentation is in the Razor Sharp: The Fabulous Women of Howard Hawks season at BFI Southbank. The movie also screens on June 3rd and 27th. Full details here.

Only Angels Have Wings is a major American movie and a pivotal film in the great Howard Hawks's career. Indeed, Robin Wood, in his BFI book on Hawks, describes the movie as a "completely achieved masterpiece". Cary Grant leads a group of pilots who regularly take their life in their hands flying mail planes across the Andes. They are joined by a sparky Jean Arthur, who drops in for a steak but fascinated by the life and times of Grant's team stays on and witnesses the adventures of one of Hawks's archetypal male groups. Only Angels Have Wings mixes tragedy and comedy in typical Hawks style and has an atmosphere all its own.

Chicago Reader review:
Howard Hawks's 1939 film represents the equilibrium point of his career: the themes he was developing throughout the 30s here reach a perfect clarity and confidence of expression, without yet confronting the darker intimations that would haunt his films of the 40s and 50s. The setting is a South American port where a group of fliers, led by Cary Grant, challenges the elements nightly by piloting mail across a treacherous mountain range. This all-male existential ritual (Grant almost seems the high priest of some Sartrean temple) is invaded by an American showgirl (Jean Arthur) who stops off for a steak and remains, fascinated by the heightened, heady atmosphere of primal struggle. The film's moral seriousness (which sometimes approaches overt didacticism) is balanced by the usual Hawks humor and warmth, and as Grant and Arthur are drawn into a romance, the film moves toward a humanistic softening of its stark premises.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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