Only Angels Have Wings Entertaining, Though Dated

 

 

 

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Directed by Howard Hawks

Columbia Pictures, 121 minutes, Not-rated

★★★ ½

 

The Wright Brothers took off in 1903, an above-the ground journey that lasted 56 seconds. There is a very American quirk of assuming that once something is proved possible, progress occurs at the snap of the fingers. When Howard Hawks directed Only Angels Have Wings three decades later, air flight was still in a state of infancy. Many airplanes were still built of fabric stretched across a light frame, all were propeller- driven, and crashes were so prevalent they ceased being newsworthy. This is the era of flight under analysis in Only Angels Have Wings, a good film though decidedly dated.

 

Another thing to bear in mind is that the film starred Cary Grant and Jean Arthur as its principals. Rita Hayworth was included, but this was her first major role and Arthur was then much more famous. The best way to watch Only Angels Have Wings is to keep these things in mind. The other is not to burst out laughing when you first see Geoff Carter (Grant) looking like a cowboy in drag in his oversized hat, flight jacket, and gun holster.

 

This film is set in an unnamed South American country, probably Chile as a port city and the Andes figure into the plot. A cargo boat enters a harbor to unload and refuel. Among those going ashore is Bonnie Lee (Arthur), who is totally comfortable with the wolf whistles, cat-calls, and swarming young men offering to buy her a drink. She heads off with two flyers vying to take her to dinner; one, Joe, loses out when he is called to fly cargo and mail for Barranca Airways, which only flies when their spotter in the Andes wires that the mountain pass is safe. Bonnie is in the bar with others, including airline manager Geoff and bar owner/Barranca backer “Dutchy” Van Ruyster (Sig Ruman*), when Joe returns in a gale, crashes, and dies. Geoff is practically the only person not in mourning for Joe, which outrages Bonnie Lee. She soon learns that sudden death isn’t unusual in the air freight business and that Geoff isn’t impressed by her histrionics or the shape of her legs. He and Dutchy are running a seat-of-the-pants operation and Geoff is more interested in being a flyer short.

 

What are these Americans even doing in such a remote place? In keeping with numerous films of the 1930s/40s–think cowboy movies or (later) Casablanca–most of them are running from something: the Depression, alcoholism, restlessness, broken hearts…. Quite a few simply love the thrill and danger of flying. Geoff falls into the bad romance category and has sworn off of (sorry!) “dames.” He’s a man of habits so particular you suspect OCD, though nobody then knew that term. His family are the boys in the airline and at the bar. Bonnie Lee thinks he’s a heartless creep, but she’s  definitely physically attracted  to him and wants to know his story. He finds her a noisy pain in the old runway, but Dutchy spills the beans on his past.

 

Five years earlier, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night won so many Oscars they almost had to order an emergency run of little golden castrati. It set the standard for plots involving two people who can’t stand each other as a prelude to romance, but let’s add few other things. One is the trope of the old guy, beloved by all, who has been hiding his failing eyesight, before Geoff grounds him.

 

The only serious applicant for the new flyer is “Bat” Mac Pherson (Richard Barthelmess),  a former bombastic hotshot involved in an incident in which he bailed out of a plane and left his partner to die. The circumstances didn’t matter; to Geoff and the rest of the boys, Bat is a rat and no one wants him. He arrives to shoulders colder than the Antarctica swim team. He also shows up with his new wife, Judy (Hayworth), who just happens to be the gal that done Geoff wrong. Judy begs Geoff to give Bat a chance. How? One of the cleverest uses of a Chekov’s gun places Geoff and Bat in the same plane during a howling snowstorm in the Alps. And with that, I’ll leave you hanging in midair!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Alice Adams Has Lost its Charm

 

 

 

 

Alice Adams (1935)

Directed by George Stevens

RKO Pictures, 99 minutes, Not-rated

★★

 

In her lifetime (1919-2001) critic Pauline Kael had the power to make or break a film. She hailed Katharine Hepburn’s lead in Alice Adams as one of her two or three greatest performances. Just goes to show you that even a known hardboiled cynic like Kael could be hopelessly sentimental and champion a film and role that were antiques even by the standards of their day.

 

It was based on a novel by Booth Tarkington that had a downbeat ending far more realistic than the sugary ending RKO forced director George Stevens to substitute. Alice (Hepburn) is a working-class daughter who dreams above her station. Her father, Virgil, (Fred Stone) is a near invalid who has long been on medical leave from Mr. Lamb’s drugstore, though he magnanimously keeps Virgil on payroll. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is a scoldwife who thinks Virgil is lazy and that Lamb cheated her family out of a fortune for a glue formula. She encourages Alice’s magazine-induced fantasies, though Alice finds herself humiliated every time she tries to fit in with a crowd whose money and lifestyle the Adams’s can’t begin to duplicate. To make matters worse, her brother Walter (Frank Albertson) is a classic n’er-do-well who tries to rise via gambling. At a fancy ball hosted by the Palmers, local elites, Alice motor mouths her way into the affections of dashing Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray). He’s loaded, but he’s also rather bored with society and Mildred Palmer’s relentless efforts to ensnare him as a love match for one of her daughters.

 

The more Arthur sits with Alice on her front porch, the more he finds her refreshing and the more Alice ups the charade that her family also has wealth. She makes certain that Arthur never enters the home to see its modest furnishings. In essence, Alice is a Cinderella wannabe who heaps lie upon lie, though Arthur shows little interest in speaking of money. The crisis arrives when it’s time to invite Arthur and his family to dine Chez Adams. Welcome to the screwball comedy portion of the film, if you can keep it down. Alice frets over everything and tries to cover worn parts of the sofa with strategic swaths of fabric. (Walter humorously spoils that dodge.)

 

Alice also attempts to put forth an “elegant” dinner after claiming that her family eats caviar every night. Naturally, it’s one the menu, though no one in her family has the slightest idea how to eat it. She hires a fake maid (Hatie McDaniel), who has even less idea how to prepare the food. The dinner is held on the hottest day of the year, but Alice insists on a soup course, a fish course, a meat course, and bananas Foster for dessert with hot coffee. In particularly painful bits of minstrelsy, McDaniel sweats her way through the evening looking like a soggy Aunt Jemima with the manners of a barn owl. Can it get worse? Yes. Arthur quit his job and “told off” old man Lamb as his wife insisted, just in time for the revelation that the Adams family are social outcasts because Arthur stole money from Lamb to cover gambling debts.

The hopes of becoming a glue baron fail to stick because good-natured Virgil intends to sell everything to make things right. Yet, as noted, the producers forced Stevens to jettison Tarkington’s ending in which  Alice gave up her big shot dreams to go to secretarial school and become a typist. In the movie, Arthur laughs off Alice’s follies and Cinderella is back in the prince’s good graces. 

 

If all of this sounds painful and labored, that’s because it is. Hepburn often played a ditz, but I’ve never bought her as a hopeless and stupid one. Some have called Alice Adams a screwball comedy, but it’s too broad even to fit within that expansive genre. Put another way, it’s more akin to an out-of-control I Love Lucy sketch than anything resembling Bringing Up Baby or Adam’s Rib.

 

Hepburn and the film actually garnered Oscar nominations, but sometimes so-called “classic films” are rusted and irreparable Model T’s best left to molder.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Dropkick Murphys Meet Woody Guthrie Documentary

 

 

This Machine Rising (2024)

Directed by Dave Stauble and Shawn Howard

https://dropkickmurphys.com , 56 minutes

★★★★

 

What first pops into your mind when someone says, “punk rock?” The Sex Pistols and the nihilism of John Lyndon (aka/ Johnny Rotten)? I hope not; they were a manufactured band, the invention of producer Malcolm McLaren seeking to cash in on a moment in musical history when mainstream rock had gone soft, disco was the rage, corporate music became dominant, protest music was marginalized, and hip-hop hadn’t quite arrived. In the late 70’s, I listened to a lot of punk and sub rosa protest folk because disco made me want to vomit mirror balls. I liked The Ramones, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, and some edgy UK and German stuff a friend in London routinely challenged me to sample. I never cared for punk culture; guess I was raised to be polite! Not to mention that I’m a pacifist whose idea of a good fight is one at least ten miles from me.

 

The more important point, though, is that punk (and some heavy metal) was/is working-class music. Originally punk espoused a DYI ethos. In an odd way that resonated with folk music, the sort that Pete Seeger used to exhort audiences to “just sing out!” In the 1990s I began to hear Celtic punk rock (Pogues, Flogging Molly, Oi Polloi, early Wolfstone….) A move to Massachusetts made me a Dropkick Murphys fan. If you have negative preconceptions about  punk, the DKMs will destroy many of them. Put simply, the Dropkick Murphys are thoughtful people. You may have seen the name Ken Casey in the news. He’s the booming lead vocalist of Dropkick Murphys who recently visited Ukraine as a part of an aid convoy, has actively heaped opprobrium on Donald Trump, called out a fan wearing a MAGA shirt (and gave him a DKM shirt to wear instead!), raised money for former GOP governor Charlie Baker rather than endorse a Democratic machine candidate, and won a Mass Humanities storyteller award. He and his Dropkick pals (Matt Kelly, Al Barr, James Lynch, Jeff DaRosa, Tim Brennan, and Kevin Rheault, plus producer Ted Hut and manager Jeff Castelaz raise money for the Claddagh Fund to help organizations supporting kids, veterans, and families in crisis. And, if you don’t already know it, the band is Boston-born and bred.

 

You can learn about some of this stuff from their recent documentary that’s free on Dropkick’s YouTube Channel. It’s titled This Machine Rising and its very title confirms a punk/folk connection; it’s a play on the slogan Woody Guthrie had on his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Guthrie wrote so many songs in his lifetime (1912-67) that new ones turn up all the time. Earlier, Dropkick Murphys had its first monster hit, “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” a 7-line scribbling from Guthrie. Another popular BKM song, “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight” also used Woody Guthrie’s lyrics. Nora’s son heard it and approached his mother about collaborating with BKM. Billy Bragg, Wilco, Dylan, Springsteen, and others have written music for some of the estimated thousands of unpublished Guthrie lyrics. In 2022, Woody’s sister Nora asked Dropkick Murphys to take a swing at them. What was supposed to be one album–This Machine Still Kills Fascists–organically spawned a second, Okemah Rising.  A national tour began in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September, and ended in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day 2024.

 

This short document shows Casey’s meticulous approach to going through the Guthrie archives. At times it feels as if the DKMs are more like Ph.D. students than punk rockers. The other thing that will strike viewers is the reverence the band paid to the material; Casey spoke of literally trembling while holding one of Woody’s original songs. Likewise, band members easily discourse on the careful approach they took to developing appropriate tunes to unscored lyrics. In other words, the Murphys interjected serious musicianship into the project, something that alerts us that if punk began as DYI music, it has evolved beyond that ethos. I’ll confess that it thrills me to hear punk raucousness filtered through bagpipes, squeeze boxes, and penny whistle. It’s equally a thrill to hear DKM unplugged as it were. Sometimes they do Guthrie acoustically; at others, Woody’s ghost plugs in with the band.

 

Hardcore DKM fans probably saw this documentary when it debuted last year. If you’ve not seen it, do so to see what good dude punk looks and sounds like.

 

Rob Weir