THE DAWN PATROL (1930)

Though WWI ended before Howard Hawks (stuck in Texas as an Army Flight Instructor*) made it ‘Over There’, he still managed to lose plenty of aviator pals in the Post-War years. Including kid brother (and fellow director) Kenneth, dead in a plane crash filming SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS just as DAWN started pre-production. A personal tragedy that finds its parallel in this Early Talkie, Hawks’ first sound film. Hard to imagine any Hollywood director other than WWI pilot William Wellman better informed to handle the gallantry & fatalism of this story’s company of wartime flyers; and the awful duties of command in having to follow impossible orders sending young men to pointless death, then live with the consequences & casualties. Some of the acting looks a bit stiff now, though pretty advanced for the period, and with a gain in rawness & verisimilitude missing from Edmund Goulding’s far smoother 1938 remake. In 1930, it’s Richard Barthelmess (his most dynamic sound perf); Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (with a star-making killer smile); Neil Hamilton (stuck with philosophical verbiage). 1938 brought in Errol Flynn; David Niven & Basil Rathbone. (See below.) Viewed with Early Talkie blinders in place, it’s a remarkable sound debut for Hawks; with superb action sequences and thematically, what with group sacrifice for a common cause & tough/tender male bonding (watch Barthelmess gently touch the sleeping Fairbank’s hair before a flight), hopelessly Hawksian.

DOUBLE-BILL: In production since 1927 (and reshot-for-sound), Howard Hughes raced to get HELL’S ANGLES, his own WWI Fly Boy meller, into theaters first. And while he did briefly beat DAWN, he soon pulled it back for re-editing. Eventually, both films ran in theaters against each other, and both did well, though HELL’S cost too much to ever earn out. Up in the sky, HELL’S tops DAWN, though each has plenty of spectacular (and mostly real) airborne action, but DAWN sweeps the board on the ground, and generally holds up far better.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Look for a great unedited shot, taken from the back as one of these prop planes takes off, from revved-up to airborne, to see just how fast these ‘kites-with-engines’ could take off. Less than ten seconds. Modern audiences sometimes giggle at such phony-looking 'special effects,' unaware they’re watching a real thing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Even Hawks, never one to let truth get in the way of a good story, might have blanched seeing his war record expanded on IMDb.com which has him flying missions in Europe as part of the famous Lafayette Escadrille. (Were they thinking of director ‘Wild’ Bill Wellman?) But then, this mini-bio also gives him credit for making a star of John Wayne in RED RIVER/’48 over John Ford’s STAGECOACH/’39, blithely ignoring a decade of starring pics in between, and then goes on to credit Hawks with directing the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy of FORT APACHE/’48 (filmed after RED RIVER, released before); SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON/’49 and RIO GRANDE/’50.