Hell’s Angels: The Sky Is the Limit

In 1925, stunt pilots formed a professional organization, called 13 Black Cats, and set standard rates for their tricks ($1,500 for parachuting out of a plane after it blows up, $1,200 for flying into trees or houses, $225 for getting pushed off the wing of a plane in midair, etc.). By the time Hughes came to Hell’s Angels, the idea of making such a movie had only recently become plausible.

Hughes rapidly went through three directors, who quit or got fired in disputes over creative control. One of them stormed off screaming, “Why don’t you direct it yourself!” Hughes soon figured, Why not? An aviation enthusiast and trained pilot, he insisted on perfect authenticity, shooting some dogfighting scenes one hundred times or more to nail the details.

Though the Hollywood press mocked the young, inexperienced tycoon for his profligacy (the more serious matter of the deaths during production didn’t seem to interest them as much), Hughes’s obsessiveness and the resulting budget are visible on-screen. The dogfights, some employing forty airplanes, are remarkably gripping. The miniatures featured in a few scenes—notably those involving a German zeppelin bombing London (based on fact) and an aerial attack on an ammunition dump (exaggerated, since, in pre-radar years, bombs weren’t very accurate)—are still hailed, almost a century later, as among the most realistic ever designed.

Though Hughes took two and a half years to make the movie, his perfectionism was only partly to blame. Toward the beginning of the shoot, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first motion-picture talkie. Hughes eventually realized Hell’s Angels would be doomed if it hit theaters as a silent film, so he reshot all the nonflying scenes, adding spoken dialogue; he even put pilots back in the sky in order to record the sounds of engines roaring and gun barrels firing. (There were, of course, no foley studios or libraries of sound effects back then.)

In his biggest change, he had to replace Greta Nissen, the actress who played the femme fatale, whose thick Norwegian accent would have been risible. He found an eighteen-year-old named Jean Harlow. Critics called her performance stiff, but few viewers cared. Even by pre-Code standards, her outfits were scanty and her scenes ultra-risqué. The editor of Photoplay bashed the movie for committing “the highest of all motion-picture crimes—bad taste” and condemned Harlow’s character as personifying “sex in its most disgusting phase, naked, vulgar, unnecessary.” Moviegoers liked it. Harlow soon evolved into the quintessential Hollywood starlet as well as an acclaimed comedienne and actress.

One extended early sequence featuring Harlow, set at a party, was shot in full color, using a two-strip process called Multicolor. The film also includes whole scenes processed with tint, including the dirigible bombing, given a blue cast for its nighttime setting. This latter technique in particular was far from new: for Wings, to cite just one example, lab technicians had dotted gun barrels with yellow tint, frame by frame, to accentuate the weapons’ firing. Even so, Hell’s Angels used color and tinting to heighten the emotions of a scene; the effect must have startled audiences who were still marveling over the innovation of sound.

But Hughes was, at best, indirectly responsible for the film’s deepest breakthrough—its disillusioned view of World War I. The key source for this was James Whale, whom Hughes had hired to direct the film’s nonflying sections. (The credits list Whale as having “staged” the dialogue scenes.) Whale demanded that someone be brought on to rewrite the script. Hughes agreed.

No copies of the original script have survived, but we can surmise what Whale found trite. It is significant that earlier that year Whale had directed the Broadway production of Journey’s End, a searing drama about the psychological toll of World War I’s trench warfare. For the Hell’s Angels rewrite, Whale hired Joseph Moncure March, a former New Yorker editor whose book-length poem The Wild Party had recently shocked and stirred readers, and who had just been brought on to touch up a screen adaptation of Journey’s End.

With Whale and March on board, this was not going to be a typical wartime romance-adventure. The cultural scholar Adam Simms may have been the first to note, in a 2015 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal (eighty-five years after the film’s release), that the plot of Hell’s Angels is “Wings viewed in a fun-house mirror.” This is worth elaboration.

Wings begins with two young American men—rivals for the same girl’s affections—going off to war, winding up in the same flight unit, and becoming pals. The whole film presents an unabashedly heroic view of war. “There was chivalry among the knights of the air,” one title card reads, in a scene where a German ace is about to shoot down one of our heroes but then, noticing that the target’s machine gun has jammed, flies away, saluting as he goes. Toward the film’s end, when the other American protagonist is shot down behind enemy lines, he dashes toward a German plane on a runway, hops into the cockpit, and starts flying it back to his base. His rival turned friend, thinking it’s a German plane, shoots it down. But all is forgiven as the friend dies in his arms; even the victim’s coldhearted parents hug the guilt-drenched young man when he comes home. The love subplot of Wings is also chaste. The girl back home is as wholesome as they come. Even when our hero goes on leave in Paris, gets drunk in a frenzied ballroom, and takes a girl up to his room, nothing happens; he falls asleep, though he later feels guilty about even that.

By contrast, Hell’s Angels focuses on two brothers in the British air corps. One of them, a naif (played by James Hall), is in love with a girl (Harlow) who seduces his more cynical brother (Ben Lyon). Later, the brothers are about to take off on what could be a suicide mission: flying a captured and repaired German plane behind enemy lines and bombing an ammunition dump, so that Allied troops can mount an offensive. The naif goes to say farewell to the girl, finds her making out with yet another man, and starts to protest—but she lashes out, deriding him as a chump, telling him she never loved him. The brothers fly off; the mission is a success, but they’re captured and locked up. The cynical brother says he’s going to tell the Germans about the purpose of their mission, warning them of the impending offensive. The idealistic one obtains a gun and shoots him (his own brother!) to protect their comrades in arms. He is executed by a German firing squad offscreen. Then we see anonymous Allied soldiers mount their offensive. The end. Grim!

There is a particularly jarring moment, halfway into the movie, when the cynical brother is ordered to fly in a dawn patrol and goes nuts, screaming:

I’m not yellow! I can see things as they are, that’s all, and I’m sick of this rotten business! You fools! Why do you let them kill you like this? What are you fighting for? Patriotism? Duty? Are you mad? Can’t you see they’re just words . . . coined by politicians and privateers to trick you into fighting for them? . . . I’ll give you a word: murder! That’s what this dirty rotten politicians’ war is—murder!

Never before, and rarely since, has the protagonist in a mainstream American movie unloaded such a radical critique of war—in this case, of a war that, by the time the movie came out, everyone realized was exactly as the cynic described.

Besides the air duels and Jean Harlow’s risqué role, this was the source of Hell’s Angels’ appeal almost a century ago. And it still resonates today.