-Devdutt Trivedi
Hell’s Angels is the first big budget blockbuster produced by Hollywood by its leading maverick tycoon Howard Hughes. Although Hell’s Angels would read ‘Directed by Howard Hughes’ on its title cards, it required a number of well known aids to help Hughes through the process of making the film. Hughes, who had begun making a silent film in 1928 with Greta Nissen in the lead, remade the entire film in sound with several sequences hand tinted and a spectacular sequence eight minute two strip sequence in Technicolor. The list of names working on the film included such important directors as Luther Reed, Edmund Goulding, Marshall Neilan, Howard Hawks and James Whale (who was hired on as dialogue coach for Jean Harlow, and also directed a good part of the film).
The most impressive sequences in the film are those centering on the war sequences and the long sequence with the Zeppelin flying over London. Hughes hired around 70 pilots to film these sequences, 3 of which died during the shooting of the film. Among the three dead was stunt pilot Clement K. Phillips who was killed in a crash in Hayward, California, while delivering one of the airplanes to the Oakland location.
The film went over budget costing Hughes $3.8 million. Although it was popular upon its release it was not able to make any profits. The film had a huge shoot to edit ratio with 249 feet of film used for ever foot in the finished film.
The film which has been criticized as being more interesting for its production values and eccentric production than its substance, was following in the footsteps of World War I dramas of the silent period such as The Big Parade (1925) and Wings (1927). According to Brian Koller, ‘Hughes wanted to follow their formula of combining romance with World War I combat drama.’ Koller also believes that Hughes had to dump Nissen because her Norwegian accent was too thick. Jean Harlow was replaced for the ‘flirtatious and promiscuous’ role of Helen, the love interest of Roy and Monte Rutledge. Harlow would be best known for her work in Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) opposite James Cagney, Suzy (George Fitzmauritz, 1934) opposite Cary Grant and Red Dust (opposite Clarke Gable). Had the film been made 4 years later the innuendo laden character of Helen would not been able to get past the censors following the guidelines of the Production Code of 1934.
The film is made at the beginning of the sound era with actors working with their faces and bodies more, like they would in silent films, than with their later counterparts in the sound film that would work more and more with the voice (which is seen most explicitly in Welles’ work). The film borrows from silent film its use of movement of objects and actors as well as intertitles to explain events. The most outstanding aspect of the film is that it does away with the conception of cinema as a language. Hollywood’s approach would be filled with syntax with each director adding to this syntax or simply using it, much like the case is in any language, with a set of verbal tools that are added onto occasionally by a set of scholars. However silent film and early sound film challenges the
conception of cinema as a language that would only be matched by the work of the avant-garde film makers who would counterpoint cinema’s claim to philosophy/art/language/politics/sociology and their mediation of the apparatus of cinema, the camera and the edit setup. In Hell’s Angels the intertitles, movement and language create a collage (and not a language) that cannot be planned by a script. The script is a guideline through which the unique movement, the unique quality of attention of the film must be realized. Language, the actor and matter in the film mediate the construction of the medium.
Although the film fails at Hughes formula of combining the love story with the war film, as it is unable to address either one of the two, its ability to relate to matter and movement as in silent film with sound added on to create an extra dimension, make it a curious entry in Hollywood’s history that would be matched only by Hawks’ movement-image in Tiger Shark (1932) and particularly Only Angels Have Wings (1938).
According to the Internet Movie Database, all color prints of the movie were thought to be lost until a print was found in John Wayne's personal vault in 1989, ten years after the actor's death, by his son Michael Wayne. That explains why the younger Wayne's name appears on the credits of the restored version. It is possible that Wayne received the print from the film's producer/director, Howard Hughes when he starred Jet Pilot (1957) for Hughes in 1949. That film was co-directed by the iconic Joseph Von Sternberg and was reworked upon between 1949-57, as Hughes was, much like in the case of Hell’s Angels, unhappy with the plane sequences.
Although the film was nominated for an Oscar for best cinematography in 1930, it lost out to Lewis Milestone’s iconic war drama All Quiet on the Western Front which won the Best Picture and Best Director award the same year. The story of the film as well as that of its author would be recreated in Martin Scorscese’s The Aviator (2005).
References:
Internet Movie Database
Dennis Schwartz
Brian Koller
Cinema Styles