Death looms over Howard Hawks' 1939 Only Angels Have Wings. Following a company of air mailmen led by Geoff (Cary Grant), the film is set in a distant and unidentified trading village in South America, surrounded by high mountains, the dark ocean and a thick fog. Although home to natives and visited by the passengers of a cruise ship every week for a few hours, the village is pretty much isolated. Reading these words one might imagine something exotic or idyllic, but no mistakes, Hawks paints it as a foggy and claustrophobic landscape, in which the pilots have to fly with outdated equipment in the harshest of conditions. We know there is an ocean in the village, we hear of ships arriving and going, but we never the see the ocean itself, save for one shot of a ship emerging from behind the fog at night, where the water is nothing but a shadow. And by the end of the film it is this shadow we remember with regards to the sea, much like the mailmen who have left their past lives behind as they did the ocean, for ever, like a self-imposed exile to purgatory.
Self-imposed it is, like rest of the famous men in Classic Hollywood. The men go after their ideals, obsessions, loves, or, they don't even have to go after anything. It is at its core a self-destructive, irrational move from the known, the habitual, the home to the unknown, to the dangerous. Yes, this is a part of Hollywood's masculine mythology or its mythology of masculinity. But there is always something poignant in this mythology and the best of these films underline just that. It is poignant, because what this leads to is ultimately man's confrontation with his own mortality, their always being on the brink of death, flirting with it, waiting for it.
And in the film where every flight is a stand-by ticket to the other side (Kid, a blinding veteran pilot says on his deathbed: Go outside, I don't want anyone to see me dying. I hadn't let anyone watch when I was flying solo for the first time neither), flying acquires such a beauty, as if, watching from the airplane, we are seeing the land for the last time. The special effects of the film look surprisingly seamless to the contemporary viewer, but there is more to it: In the way Hawks, an aviator himself, shoots and constructs the air scenes there seems to be a hesitation to move towards the merely spectacular. There is a kind of restrained choreography to these scenes that goes beyond the WOW!, to somewhere deeper where a flying airplane acquires a meaning, a profundity of it own. The more you watch the more elevated you are.
Finally, the film's beautiful and ever-meaningful title: Only Angels Have Wings. What a better way to phrase man's weakness at the face of the sky!
