Hawks’s wired reply to Warner, which calmed the anxiety in Burbank for a week or two, gives some indication of the difficulties he was going through. It read, in part (with punctuation added): “First, as to field across from Drew, recent rains made ground too soft to hold airplanes, trucks and equipment.… Your information about yesterday was not correct. We planned
four nights’ work in succession & used yesterday to rehearse action. We took lamps from the studio for this purpose. We got only long shots because an actor suffered from heat prostration and will be confined to bed for several days.” Hawks went on to list myriad other technical hurdles, concluding, “It is not my intention to make excuses, but we believe we have been under difficulties which we
have now overcome & with any luck should accomplish the work we set out to do in the estimated time. One thing I assure you, Jack. Not one of us wants to stay down here any longer than is necessary to get a good picture.”
It was true that Hawks was modifying Nichols’s dialogue constantly on location, partly with an eye to paring it down to the minimum and partly to make it more realistic. Hawks
had the technical adviser, Triffy, by his side at all times, and Triffy was impressed with the way Hawks was on top of every detail and made every scene come alive, turning it into “more truth than fiction.” In his determination to make the picture as authentic and powerful a portrait of aerial warfare as possible, Hawks was as demanding with his stunt fliers and crew as he was with his actors,
to the point where Triffy, who flew both American and Japanese-marked planes for the filming, came to see Hawks and his allies as “ruthless! Absolutely ruthless! If they could have damaged [an] airplane in flight so I would have had an accident, they would have done it. Really! I couldn’t trust them. I mean it.” When he saw the finished film, Triffy was satisfied with its military authenticity, except
for the instance in which John Garfield picks up a large machine gun and brings down an attacking Japanese fighter plane.
A strange publicity item released by Warners at this time stated, “So pretentious are plans for the Hal B. Wallis production of
Air Force
at Warner Bros. that budget and time restrictions have been completely scrapped; director Howard Hawks’ only obligation to the company
is to ‘bring in the greatest air picture ever filmed.’” In reality, the reverse was true, and Hawks responded to the pressure by shifting into unheard-of seven-day work weeks and obeying Warner’s command to save film by making only one take of all shots. On August 22, Wallis ordered Hawks to return to Los Angeles on
August 26, but Hawks flatly refused, insisting that he absolutely needed three
days beyond that to shoot B-17s returning to the airfield at dusk. Later, even Wallis admitted that what Hawks and Howe captured on film for this sequence was worth the extra time. As Howe was setting up his lights for the sequence in the late afternoon, he discovered that his generator was on the blink. He explained the problem to Hawks, who was less than helpful. As Howe told it, “He said, ‘Don’t
tell me that. That’s not my problem, that’s your problem.’” Howe made do by using signal flares with the reflectors from the lights, which achieved superb results: “They flickered and it was wonderful, because the airport was—the landing field was supposed to be on fire—in flames.” The flames and drifting smoke being cut by the planes and their landing lights and propellers created a brilliant
effect and Hawks congratulated his cinematographer on his ingenuity.
Finally, on August 30, after thirty-one days, the company decamped for the long trip back to California. The train pulled into Union Station at 8:15
P.M
. on September 2, and the following morning Hawks was in Hal Wallis’s office being told in no uncertain terms to shoot only precisely what was needed, to stop rewriting every
scene, and to speed things up. Hawks naturally responded by proceeding with rewrites of several significant sequences. Hawks decided that he wanted to end the film on a “clever” note, with the exhausted men thankfully “getting into bed, feeling the mattress, etc.;” after their tremendous effort, it was doubtless what he felt like doing after having had only two days off during the entire Florida
shoot. Jack Warner instantly vetoed this, insisting that the film needed an “up ending” of the men being congratulated and recognized for their heroics. This argument dragged on for weeks. Hawks realized that further work was needed on a couple of scenes, particularly the one in which Captain Quincannon (John Ridgely) dies, which the director found grossly sentimental in Nichols’s script.
As
it happened, the financially desperate William Faulkner had arrived at Union Station on July 24, a matter of hours before Hawks left from there for Tampa, to work under contract at Warners for a paltry $300 per week, concentrating on a screenplay about Charles De Gaulle and the Free French movement that was never made. During his first week back in September, Hawks called on his old friend and, in
two days, Faulkner wrote a vastly improved version of Quincannon’s death, in which the crew gathers around his bed and helps the expiring man run through the cockpit checklist, as they have done so many times, and imagine that he is taking off once more. It was an impressive conceptual piece of writing, as well as a quintessential
example of Hawksian professionalism and stoicism. The other scene
was of a more comic bent, with George Tobias, as the Brooklyn boy making fun of California, delivering the one recognizably Faulknerian line: “The sun shines and nothing ever happens, and before you know it you’re sixty years old.”
On September 11, the production was officially declared three weeks behind schedule, and more than half of the scenes remained to be shot. By September 17, the seventy-two-day
schedule had been exceeded. Through the remainder of the month Hawks pushed along at the deliberate pace of about a page and a half per day. On October 2, a further second unit, headed by the film editor George Amy, was created to knock off some exteriors and process shots; on the same day, Warner unilaterally announced that the picture would wrap on October 17, regardless of what had
or had not been shot. Hawks responded the next day, a Saturday, by covering more dialogue—three pages’ worth—than he had in a single stretch in weeks, but on Sunday he decided upon a different strategy to combat Warner’s increasing harassment.
The Warners press release stated that because Howard Hawks had come down with a bad streptococous infection, Vincent Sherman was taking over as director
of
Air Force
. Officially, then, Hawks was just out sick; in fact, he was feigning illness in protest of what he considered the executives’ ill-considered, high-handed manner. Hawks was betting that upon seeing Sherman’s dailies, Warner, if not Wallis, would readily recognize the superiority of Hawks’s work and ask him back. As Sherman recalled, “I thought [the rough cut] was very good, but the
last thing Wallis said to me was, ‘I don’t want the script changed, not a word.’ On the set the next morning we were rehearsing, and someone said, ‘You can’t say this because Howard changed something earlier.’ I called Hal Wallis and said I had to change something. He said, ‘Okay, but don’t change anything else.’”
Sherman was directing scenes of the crew in the bomber, and he found that “the
actors were working in the Hawks style, underplaying. Wallis came on the set and said, ‘Can’t you get some life out of them? Bump ’em up, bump ’em up, they’re flat.’ But that was Hawks’s style. I think what Hawks was going for was to let the audience supply the emotion. He didn’t portray hysteria. But I boosted them up a bit, even though I thought it was wrong. On the second day, Jack Warner said
my first day’s dailies were ‘great, they’re great. Keep it up. I want you to finish the picture.’ Later that day I asked Hal Wallis what was going on, and he said, ‘Never mind. It’s none of your business. And whatever you do, don’t talk to Hawks.’ I didn’t know exactly
what the problem was, but I presumed that Wallis was displeased that Hawks was changing the script.”
On Saturday, October 10,
as Sherman was shooting an exterior of the bomber in a clearing, Hawks suddenly showed up on the set at 3:30
P.M
. “I
could hear things going on,” remembered Sherman, “and later I got a call telling me I wouldn’t be working tomorrow.” It turned out that assistant director Jack Sullivan, a Hawks loyalist, had been calling Hawks every night to tell him what was going on. That Sunday, Sherman met
privately with Hawks, who told him he didn’t hold him responsible for what had happened. “He said, ‘I just want to tell you about the kind of man you’ve been working for,’ and he went on a tirade about Wallis. It turned out Howard was not ill at all. I learned about the major rift between Wallis and Hawks, and Howard was very bitter about Hal Wallis. They were two very strong personalities. Wallis
had a big problem about Howard’s habit of rewriting scripts. He felt a loss of authority with Hawks.”
Hawks told Sherman he intended to reshoot some of what the substitute had done, “just because I want to show Wallis who’s doing this film.” Years later, Hawks claimed that Warner didn’t like anything Sherman shot and was begging Hawks all the while to return to the studio; he also claimed he
didn’t use any of Sherman’s “lousy” footage in the final film. To the contrary: the day after Hawks returned, Sherman was put in charge of an additional unit that shot simultaneously with Hawks’s for five more days to hasten the picture’s completion. Hawks did do a handful of retakes, but he also had to shoot the hospital scenes, some tail and bubble gunner stuff, and numerous process shots. After
a fourteen-hour final day,
Air Force
finally wrapped on October 26. The picture had shot for 105 days, thirty-three days over its original schedule. Hawks had managed to shoot 164 pages of Nichols’s 207-page original, with the remaining scenes merely eliminated.
Because of the delays, it was obvious by now that the film was not going to make its hoped-for December 7 opening date. But Jack Warner
was still anxious to mark the anniversary, so the studio boss traveled to Washington to present the hastily cut picture to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Hap Arnold, and numerous other military brass. As expected, the response was positive, but the Office of War Information expressed serious concern about what the other Allies would make of a line in the epilogue stating that Americans would
have to win this war alone. Shortly thereafter, the Hays Office objected to John Garfield’s line “Damn ’em! Damn ’em!,” uttered when he sees what the Japanese have done to Pearl Harbor, but Warner Bros. won its appeal based upon the precedent set by Clark Gable’s “Frankly,
my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in
Gone with the Wind
. The long cut originally featured one additional battle, but walkouts
toward the end at public previews prompted its quick elimination. Hawks wanted to shorten the picture further, particularly the final battle scene, but a satisfied Warner declared on January 18 that no more changes would be made and quickly began showing the film to government dignitaries, aviation executives, and the press.
Air Force
had its world premiere on February 3, 1943, at the Hollywood
Theater in New York City, replacing
Casablanca
after its three-month run. The reviews were excellent, praising the film for its apparent authenticity, dramatic excitement, and morale-building qualities and comparing it favorably to the English war-effort hit of the moment, Noël Coward and David Lean’s
In Which We Serve
. Hawks personally received more credit than he had on
Sergeant York
because
of his prior mainstream reputation as a director of aviation pictures. The director was further praised for avoiding the usual “Hollywood hokum” and for centering on a group of men rather than the heroics of a single star. Even the critic for the
Daily Worker
admired the film’s portrayal of “the new relationships among men being developed by a people’s war.” The only recurring criticisms were
directed at the obvious overlength and at the film’s flagrantly false suggestion that the local Hawaiians of Japanese descent helped sabotage Pearl Harbor.
Although not in a class with
Sergeant York, Air Force
still proved to be a powerful commercial draw, ranking as Warner Bros.’ fourth biggest earner of 1942 with $2.7 million in rentals. There are numerous worthwhile angles from which to consider
the film. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about it is the way it embodies, in an inspiring and uncloying way, the ideals of democracy. Because of the expert handling of the interlocking story strands and emotional and dramatic impact, the idea of diverse individuals coming together for the common good is indelibly expressed; as Robin Wood put it, “it is the triumph of individualism placed
at the service of something beyond itself.” At the same time, Hawks’s preferred method of abstracting his protagonists from a context of real life and society comes heavily into play. Military hierarchies, tradition, and family and emotional ties are secondary to the functioning of the group. Of all the Hawksian groups over the years, the one in
Air Force
is unique in that there is no one whose
natural talents make him a distinct leader. John Garfield’s rear gunner Winocki, like Richard Barthelmess’s discredited flier in
Only Angels Have Wings
, may have caused another man’s death some years before, something for which the captain, at least, holds him responsible. In all of Hawks’s previous war
films, as well as in others featuring civilians, the director chose to have at least one character
commit suicide as a way to assert himself, resolve a dead-end situation, or admit his unsuitability for the group good. But from this point on, it is as if Hawks changed his mind about suicide both as a dramatic device and as a human act. In
Air Force
he instead has Winocki transform his negative emotions into a positive force for himself and those around him.
The film takes the form of a perilous
journey, almost like a classic Western in which the protagonists must improvise under the constant threat of ambush. More often noted by critics is the picture’s function as a micro-cosm—not as a simplistic one representing different ethnic aspects of America but virtually as an organic microcosm of democracy, with the men representing the parts that make up the plane, which in turn is part
of a specific fleet, which itself is just a portion of the total war effort. Hawks’s movie is equal parts physics, action, and emotion, all balanced by the master engineer to run beautifully together, even if on the spare parts of propaganda, nationalism, and expediency.