Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Second Howard Hawks movie in two days, and the third in about a week. He’s going to pass out my Altman run at this rate. I had no idea what this was about going in, and it sets itself up a little bit as a straightforward romance with Jean Arthur running into Cary Grant shortly after arriving in some remote South American port where he runs an air mail service.
Except it’s more than that, pulls out wider, there’s the Dutch bar owner struggling for money, the death of one of the pilots in a crash that everyone forces themselves to get over immediately, the guy who turns up about a third of the way in and gets a full redemption arc. Rita Hayworth pops up for a bit. The Grant/Arthur romance just kind of goes away for a while. We learn that the company will get a full, expensive contract to fly the mail if they can maintain a perfect record for six months. And wouldn’t you know it, we’re a day away from six months and there’s a huge storm rolling in.
Some very impressive flying scenes from a time before computers, and the stakes and locations are always clear, we keep a flow of information from the ground to the relay station up in the mountains. Will they deliver the mail despite many, many accidents? Wait, there’s a romance for a second! No, we’re done with that for now, it’s flying time again! The romance burns away in the background, Grant basically adopts the Heat doctrine that says don’t attach yourself to anything you can’t walk away from in 30 seconds flat, even though he hasn’t done any crimes really. Jean Arthur basically agrees to this and says she’ll let him do all his dangerous flying and such and not stand in his way, until he actually does some dangerous flying and they both realise they kind of don’t want to run away from everything.
One of those movies where you can feel how life was there before it started and continues after you leave.