A product of MGM in its heyday, written by Frank "Spig" Wead, about whom John Ford was to later make a movie ("The Wings of Eagles"), directed by Victor Fleming, a man's man who barked orders, played rough, and boozed it up. Manly Clark Gable is the test pilot who always wants to push the envelope, even though he met and married the devoted Myrna Loy overnight. Spencer Tracy is the sidekick, there to provide common sense, worry about Gable, and maintain Gable's airplanes.
With credits like that, it can't be all bad. Yet the characters are familiar. We've all seen movies before in which the hero is involved in some dangerous pursuit and the woman wants him to quit, settle down, and have babies in a normal home instead of all this running around with roughnecks -- and the drinking and swearing and the exhilaration of the adrenalin rush and all those tootsies hanging around and in general everybody carrying on like animals in a zoo. And why doesn't he get a haircut? She wants him to become a farmer or a shopkeeper or something, and start going to church, and she wants to push the perambulator along the sidewalks.
Now, usually -- are you following this? -- usually the sidekick is homelier than the hero, as is the case here, and frequently he's in love with the hero's pretty wife, devoted to her in fact, which is not the case here. It's not one of Tracy's better parts, hobbled as he is by a script that turns him into a sullen and disapproving partner before he becomes a sacrificial lamb who turns Gable's life around.
It's too talky. I enjoyed the scenes of flight, even the mock ups. I mean, how often do you get to see an experimental model of the B-17 on the screen? Or a Seversky P-35, a kind of forebear of the legendary P-47 Thunderbolt? The airplanes are real. On the other hand, you can usually tell when something dramatic is about to happen -- an engine fails, a stall takes place -- because suddenly we're watching obvious models.
There's a scene at a drunken party after one of the test pilots goes all the way in. Myrna Loy happens to mention the dead pilot's name, Benson, and Gable is suddenly enraged and shouts at her, "Who's Benson?" We get a similar exchange, more light hearted, in Howard Hawks' "Only Angels Have Wings" a year or two later. ("Who's Joe?") I'd like to think of it as a case of independent invention but Hawks was notorious for ripping stuff off from himself as well as others.
With credits like that, it can't be all bad. Yet the characters are familiar. We've all seen movies before in which the hero is involved in some dangerous pursuit and the woman wants him to quit, settle down, and have babies in a normal home instead of all this running around with roughnecks -- and the drinking and swearing and the exhilaration of the adrenalin rush and all those tootsies hanging around and in general everybody carrying on like animals in a zoo. And why doesn't he get a haircut? She wants him to become a farmer or a shopkeeper or something, and start going to church, and she wants to push the perambulator along the sidewalks.
Now, usually -- are you following this? -- usually the sidekick is homelier than the hero, as is the case here, and frequently he's in love with the hero's pretty wife, devoted to her in fact, which is not the case here. It's not one of Tracy's better parts, hobbled as he is by a script that turns him into a sullen and disapproving partner before he becomes a sacrificial lamb who turns Gable's life around.
It's too talky. I enjoyed the scenes of flight, even the mock ups. I mean, how often do you get to see an experimental model of the B-17 on the screen? Or a Seversky P-35, a kind of forebear of the legendary P-47 Thunderbolt? The airplanes are real. On the other hand, you can usually tell when something dramatic is about to happen -- an engine fails, a stall takes place -- because suddenly we're watching obvious models.
There's a scene at a drunken party after one of the test pilots goes all the way in. Myrna Loy happens to mention the dead pilot's name, Benson, and Gable is suddenly enraged and shouts at her, "Who's Benson?" We get a similar exchange, more light hearted, in Howard Hawks' "Only Angels Have Wings" a year or two later. ("Who's Joe?") I'd like to think of it as a case of independent invention but Hawks was notorious for ripping stuff off from himself as well as others.