From the
point of view of Hawks’s work, his career decidedly entered a new phase with the blossoming of his relationship with Slim. There is no
question that the eight films he directed during the eight years he and Slim were involved—from
Only Angels Have Wings
through
Red River
—represent the greatest and most creatively vibrant period of his career. Not only that, but every one of the films, which also
included
His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire, Air Force, To Have and Have Not
, and
The Big Sleep
, was hugely popular at the box office, resulting in one of the most remarkably sustained runs of artistic and commercial success in Hollywood history.
Beyond this, however, the films were different in feel and treatment when it came to portraying relations between men and women, as well as
in the fates accorded the leading characters. Gone now would be the reckless and sometimes suicidal heroes of
The Dawn Patrol, Scarface, The Crowd Roars, Today We Live, Ceiling Zero
, and
The Road to Glory
, as well as the powerful but pathetic older men unsuccessfully trying to make it work with younger women of
Tiger Shark, Barbary Coast
, and
Come and Get It
. Also absent during this period was
the comedy of humiliation and emasculation that could be found both before (in
Bringing Up Baby
) and immediately after (in
I Was a Male War Bride
) his years with Slim. Hawks’s sound films throughout the 1930s were, by Hollywood standards, notably short on conventional “happy” endings; when the young male and female leads actually got together at the end it was only after the deaths of other men
who, while not evil, loved the women too hopelessly and were simply in the way. Even the ostensibly upbeat
Bringing Up Baby
concluded with the woman dangling in midair, precariously held by the man whose life’s work she has just destroyed.
During the Slim period, the leading men and women were much more equally balanced, able to take the other’s measure, decide what they wanted, and spend the
greater part of the running time getting it. There was a sense, too, in most of these films that these men and women were made for each other, were meant to be together. For that reason, the viewer believed in and rooted for these couples more than for most others in the Hawks canon. Hawks made a point of never showing the domesticity and dullness of “real” marriage and family life, only satirically
acknowledging the threat it represented in the guise of what might happen to Hildy Johnson if she were to marry Ralph Bellamy’s sappy Bruce Baldwin in
His Girl Friday
. The sharp-witted, innuendo-laden, sexually electric pairings of equal partners, while present in pregnant form in some of Hawks’s previous films and often mimicked thereafter, was the great hallmark of the Slim years, a fantasy
of how things could be between a man and a woman that Slim inspired in Hawks and that he was miraculously able to realize on film with
the considerable assistance of some of the greatest writing and acting talent of the day. When war and the West didn’t take precedence, it was the intricate dynamics of sexual combustion between men and women that preoccupied the poetic engineer Howard Hawks during
these years. For a while, Slim made it evident that Hawks actually had a beating heart somewhere behind his hard, impenetrable shell.
At the time he met Slim, Hawks was in the process of putting together the pieces of his next film. He had been through a rocky time professionally with
Come and Get It, Bringing Up Baby
, and
Gunga Din
, and he knew it was imperative to make a surefire commercial
bet. But, as always, he was looking for maximum control and minimum interference, so he turned once again to Harry Cohn and Columbia, where he had virtual carte blanche as long as he could deliver a strong story for Cary Grant and one of his top female stars—in this case, Jean Arthur. Grant, who had rotating, nonexclusive deals at RKO and Columbia and was available for work at other studios as well,
was desperately sought at that moment by Ernst Lubitsch to star opposite Garbo in
Ninotchka
at MGM. But the actor owed his next picture to Columbia and Cohn wouldn’t let him off the hook, so he readily agreed to work again with Hawks, having enjoyed himself so much on
Bringing Up Baby
.
The story Hawks had in mind eventually became one of the screen’s great fantasy adventures, but the irony is
that in Hawks’s mind, the film was virtually a documentary, in that “there wasn’t one single scene in the whole picture that wasn’t real.”
Only Angels Have Wings
had its origins in the people and places Hawks encountered in Mexico while scouting locations for
Viva Villa!
Hawks often took credit for the film’s story—in fact, his screen credit for it was dropped only at the very last minute—but
the first document on record concerning the project is a seven-page synopsis called “Plane Number Four” by the screenwriter and former magazine feature writer Anne Wigton that was submitted to Columbia in January 1938. The synopsis bears a remarkable resemblance to the course of action in the finished film, establishing the setting as Baranca, “a little banana port on the coast of Equador” and describing
the Dutchman’s as “a combination general store, hotel, bank, restaurant and operations office of Baranca Airways.” The main characters were mostly “crazy” fliers who daily flew hazardous missions in makeshift planes over the mountains and whose philosophy was “Live for today.” Also of possible relevence was a 1937 RKO release,
Flight From Glory
, about down-and-out pilots flying rickety planes
on dangerous routes over the Andes. For a sixty-seven-minute programmer with no particular
aspirations to complexity or depth of characterization, the film was unusually well received at the time and did not pass unnoticed by critics and audiences. There is no way of knowing if Hawks, or any of his writers, ever saw the film, but the setup and many of the plot points bear an uncanny resemblance
to the picture Hawks was soon to make.
In a rare instance of Hawks himself setting pen to paper, the director produced a five-page document laying out his thoughts on the story. In fact, in his brief treatment, called “Plane Four from Baranca,” there is no story at all, just a roughing out of a few characters and incidents based entirely upon the people he had briefly met in Mexico. They were
“outcasts,” close relatives of Cagney’s irresponsible Dizzy Davis in
Ceiling Zero
. For Hawks, “collectively and individually they were the finest pilots I’ve ever seen but they had been grounded because of accidents, drinking, stunting, smuggling—each man’s existence almost a story in itself.”
The rawness of situations described by Hawks in some ways looks ahead more to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s
1953 French suspense classic
The Wages of Fear
than it does to the film he shortly made: the men’s “living accommodations were bad, they were lonely, women-starved,” and they “flew anywhere, carried prospectors to country almost impossible to reach in any other way, dropped their passengers and picked them up three months later. (A great scene took place after each of these trips on the pilot’s
return—they all gathered over a map and each man made his own map to be used in picking up the passengers in case of the death of the pilot who did the outgoing trip.) They carried gold, silver, equipment, acid, dynamite, T.N.T—anything that people would pay them to carry.”
Hawks’s treament dwelled upon such technical matters as the fliers’ jerry-built planes, poor navigational equipment, and
short and swampy landing strips. Most important, the story would be “very real, as is always the case with a group of men who may die tomorrow.”
As for the characters, the central figure was to be the little band’s leader, Tex. “You could only guess at his history,” Hawks wrote, “because he didn’t talk much even when drinking—and that was most of the time. Tex was rather young and had been through
a crash and resultant fire that had burned one side of his face and left rather interesting scars. Because of this he hadn’t much expression, except in his eyes, but that was enough. He ran the outfit the only way it could be run—by complete domination—what he said went and everybody knew he’d do twice anything he asked to have done.”
Equally important for Hawks, of course, was Tex’s woman, and
the way he saw her fitting into the group and the men’s activities qualifies her
as a real-life prototype for what became the fully realized Hawksian woman: “Just before I met him Tex had married Bonnie—they were a great pair. She was blonde, pretty, full of life and a great sense of humour.… Outwardly unlike Tex she was strangely like him otherwise. She loved flying as much as he did, not just
the riding around but that strange love for the air that the men had. Bonnie had been married before to one of the other pilots. He had been killed and she had drifted and knocked around until meeting Tex. According to the various tales Bonnie knew immediately what she wanted and Tex did not—and so the war started.”
One story Hawks particularly liked, although he had to know it would never get
by the censors, had to do with the other pilots hanging a device used to record flight vibrations under Tex and Bonnie’s honeymoon bed. Hawks testified that “on the night I met them Tex and Bonnie received a nicely framed record of their marriage night. Bonnie proudly hung it over the mantel in the living room.”
For the subplots, there was “one story, particularly interesting, of a young fellow
who had come down to fly with them. He had brought with him his wife, young and inexperienced as himself. He hadn’t been able to fit in—lost his nerve and started to go to pieces. Tex had liked the wife and been contemptuous of the boy. Tex hadn’t many morals or scruples and in a place where a good-looking white woman is practically never seen started after the wife. Bonnie complicated the whole
situation, she did everything she could to get in Tex’s way.”
Hawks concluded his notations by stating, “This is the story I want to do, using the background of this group of men and their spirit—daily adventures—as a beginning.… Ending with Tex taking the boy’s job on a dangerous flight resulting in the crash that scarred his face. The Boy and Girl sent back to the States and Tex and Bonnie
carrying on together.”
The screenplay to
Only Angels Have Wings
has always been viewed as the essence of Jules Furthman in its world-weary romanticism, cynical attitude toward sex, hard-shelled and stoic leading man, and footloose leading lady with a past. However, Furthman was but one of five writers (not including Hawks) who worked on the script between September 1938 and February 1939. Furthman
created the characters, at Hawks’s instructions, and pounded out the basic script, but Columbia acknowledged, in a certificate filed with the Academy upon the end of production, that the contribution of Eleanore Griffin and William Rankin “represented more than 10% of the value of the completed screenplay.” Anne Wigton wrote and rewrote many of Cary Grant’s scenes with both Jean Arthur and Rita
Hayworth, although Furthman was always on hand to fine-tune story points, punch up the bon mots, and apply the stainless-steel finish.
Unfortunately, the various script drafts by the different authors are not available to be examined, but such notes on them as exist indicate that co-writers Eleanore Griffin (who won an Oscar that year for her original story for MGM’s
Boys Town
) and William Rankin
initially centered the story around the inexperienced “Boy,” observing his coming-of-age under severe performance and peer-group pressure. The “Girl” in this draft is written as a young society lady. Griffin and Rankin delivered two different treatments and one full script before bowing out.
Once Furthman took over, Cary Grant’s tough Jeff Carter character, based on the Tex Hawks met, took center
stage, and Bonnie was transformed into a vagabond showgirl in the mold of the lead women in Conrad’s
Victory
and the Furthman-Sternberg
Morocco
. The “Boy” was cleverly remolded into a Lord Jim of the air, an older man forever scarred by a failure of character which saw him survive when others perished. Hawks later claimed he was based on a man who, during the shooting of a Howard Hughes picture,
parachuted out of a spinning plane before checking to see if his partner could also get out. The other man died, and Hawks said that the survivor “spent the rest of his life trying to prove that he was brave. He flew at every air circus in some little pusher plane that he’d built until he finally cracked up and killed himself. Barthelmess was playing that character.” (Ironically, in the fascinating
1931
The Sun Also Rises
knockoff
The Last Flight
, written by John Monk Saunders, Barthelmess had portrayed a pilot who had gone down with his plane in order to not leave his mechanic behind.) Furthman made the Lord Jim reference all but explicit in a great speech in which Sparks explains the code to the man’s wife: “Captain deserting a ship … radio operator leaving his post. You are supposed to
stay, and if you don’t among your own kind you’re a marked man. No matter where you go—your story travels ahead of you … and if they haven’t heard it you think they have, so what they don’t do to you, you do to yourself.” The critic Robin Wood has also noted similarities between Thomas Mitchell’s Kid and Singleton in Conrad’s
The Nigger of the Narcissus
. The “Girl” took on the past of Hawks’s
real Bonnie of having been involved with one of the other pilots, who turns out to have been Jeff, raising the question of whether he will sleep with her again.
The art director, Lionel Banks, oversaw the construction of the sprawling Baranca set on the Columbia Ranch in North Hollywood, right next to the Shangri-La of Capra’s 1937
Lost Horizon
. The beautifully designed tropical
village was covered
by translucent tarpaulin stretched across beams that vaulted more than sixty feet above the ground, and the shooting area was controlled to the extent that a full array of lights was available to be mounted on the beams and scaffolding surrounding the set. However, to the consternation of the cinematographer, Joseph Walker, the space often resembled an exterior more than an interior because
of the ease with which cold, rain, and changing sunlight seeped in through the tarp. The amiable and inventive Walker, Capra’s regular cinematographer, had briefly worked with Hawks before, shooting makeup tests for
Twentieth Century
, and his shadowy, “sling-the-lamps-low” lighting style was enriched by striking the film’s original release prints in a chocolate-toned sepia.