Kino Lorber
Paramount Picture's aerial-combat drama has a strong anti-war theme (akin to, but not as renown as, the popular trench-warfare tragedy "All Quiet on the Western Front") and is set among a brotherhood of biplane fighter pilots based outside Paris in 1918 during the first World War. Jerry Young (Frederic March) becomes a famed ace, with more than a dozen kills, but over time he grows traumatized, disillusioned, and disgusted with the impersonal death dealt out by both the British and the German sides. Jerry is especially tormented that his succession of "observer" pilots, mainly along to take photographs, perish while Jerry escapes from battle unscathed. His comrade Henry Crocker (Cary Grant), meanwhile, is an eager gunner-navigator who violates warrior chivalry by even shooting Germans out of unarmed spy balloons or trying to parachute to safety. Third-billed Jack Oakie is the comic relief, a happy-go-lucky type who does not endure (Oakie would later complain that nobody remembered his numerous silver-screen outings except Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," so here is one). Luminous Carole Lombard has only a few scenes of glamorous footage as "The Beautiful Lady," a female with whom March enjoys a brief idyll before getting back to the front lines; she's like some kind of dream-vision female who seems to exist completely apart from the violent world—which may have been the point or may have been a casualty of the short running time. A still-shocking, fatalistic ending is also ill-served by the material's brevity, but helps to remind that this film came from a passionate pacifist POV that would seldom be seen again in such popular big-studio flyboy movies, from Pearl Harbor all the way to "Top Gun" (or for that matter, "Flyboys"). Extras include related theatrical trailers and a scholarly commentary by author Lee Gambin, who interprets the Carole Lombard character as an angel-of-death metaphor; reveals that the Cary Grant role nearly went to Gary Cooper instead, which Gambin thinks would have been interesting but would have lacked the borderline-scoundrel ingredient brought by the dynamic young Grant; and that while the direction is credited to Stuart Walker, the picture was probably helmed by Mitchell Leisen instead. Recommended. (C. Cassady)