Air Mail (1932)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

This is How Movies Should Be Made

A Disappointing Continuation

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Although John Ford was one of the top directors of his time, he apparently didn't always get prime opportunities to helm movies-- particularly earlier in his career. Despite making such prestigious films as "The Iron Horse" and "3 Bad Man" and dozens of other films, here Universal Studios hired him to direct a film which is not much better than a B-movie--passable entertainment and worth seeing but otherwise unremarkable.The film is set in an airport in the desert and Mike (Ralph Bellamy) is in charge of this airmail operation. However, the job is dangerous and they keep losing people. So, when they are down a man he hires an unlikely guy, Duke (Pat O'Brien). He's unlikely because Duke is a top pilot...one of the world's best...and why would he get involved with such a dangerous and thankless operations? Plus, as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Duke is a total jerk-- only interested in himself and certainly not a team player. So how is Duke going to rise to the occasion and prove himself to be something more? See the film...or not.This film is unusual because the part Pat O'Brien plays is very much unlike his usual nice-guy persona. It's also unusual because the film plays a lot like Howard Hawks' film "Only Angels Have Wings" but isn't nearly as good nor as well acted. Passable and predictable entertainment...the sort of film John Ford could have directed in his sleep.

If any of you have seen John Ford's tribute biography to Spig Wead The Wings Of Eagles, you'll recall that Ward Bond plays a director modeled on Ford who is contacting former flier Wead to write a screenplay of an aviation film he's planning to do. For some reason Airmail has not been readily available for the public in years, but fortunately I did get to see a copy and now know what Ford and Wead were negotiating for.Airmail stars Pat O'Brien and Ralph Bellamy as a hotshot pilot and the supervisor of an airport in the western USA. O'Brien curiously enough is playing the kind of role that James Cagney would have been cast in the many collaborations those two did at Warner Brothers where O'Brien would sign in the following year. Bellamy in turn is playing a typical Pat O'Brien role, the authority figure who has to take the wind out of Cagney's sails.Airmail does live up to Spig Wead's hopes and dreams of a tribute to the men who flew these crates delivering the mail. As airplanes got better and safer mail delivery got to be taken for granted. But putting an airmail stamp on a letter meant in the early Thirties you were asking a pilot to risk his life so your loved ones could get news from you. The film was extremely timely as in 1932 the topic of air safety was a big one as news of pilot crashes of mail planes seemed to be occurring regularly.O'Brien who has no hesitation in letting everyone know he's the best at what he does, starts an affair with Lillian Bond the unhappily married wife of fellow pilot Russell Hopton. This isn't a first for either O'Brien or Bond. Later on Hopton is killed, one among the many deaths in Airmail. The climax has O'Brien flying a rescue mission for Bellamy who with a lack of pilots takes an Airmail plane up to deliver the mail what happens is for you to see Airmail, but it's along the lines of several Cagney/O'Brien films.Speaking of which Cagney and O'Brien a few years later starred in the screen adaption of Spig Wead's Broadway play Ceiling Zero. That one is rather static owing to a bad cross over from stage to screen. Airmail is qualitatively better.And while the special effects are ancient, the drama is real and contemporary. Try to see this rarely seen Ford feature when it's broadcast. It was strange to see O'Brien in a Cagney part, but he acquitted himself well.

I have nothing further to add M. Dumonteil's perceptive remarks on "Air Mail", but I just want to say that this film is criminally neglected among Ford's works. I just saw it for the first time in years and I really loved it very much. When I first saw it about 3 years ago, I didn't care for it that much. But now I think it is one of Ford's most stirring and beautiful masterworks. "Air Mail" will inevitably be compared to Hawks' masterful "Only Angels Have Wings" but Hawks' film is closer to the romantic exoticism of Josef von Sternberg, whereas Ford's shows the influence of Murnau. Of course, Ford surpassed this early effort many times in his career but it should not be missed. It should be a fascinating companion to Ford's "The Wings of Eagles", a superb biography of Frank Weade, the scenarist of "Air Mail".

Released the same year as "Flesh",this is much more "fordian" than the movie starring Wallace Beery."Airmail contains the seeds of a lot of things which will be developed by the director afterward:manly friendship,sense of duty,struggle against the elements.And most of all,the fact that any man can redeem himself.There are such characters in the script:the first one is the pilot who,in the past,left his plane (with passengers)before the crash;the second is Duke (Pat O'Brien)who falls first under a femme fatale's spell,then leaves her and comes to his mate's rescue,at his own risk.People often say that Ford's cinema is very optimistic.These ones have tunnel vision.There are a lot of deaths in this film:Joe 's and "Dizzy"'s ones are particularly dreadful.The men here are true heroes who give everything:Bellamy's character will face the storm,in spite of his lover's plea."Only angels have wings"(Hawks ,1939)would certainly be influenced by Ford whose interest in planes would not be dried up when he directed "The wings of eagles" in 1957.NB:Would you believe it?Gloria Stewart was famous back in 1997 for playing old Rose Dewitt Bukater!!