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Carné has Quai des Brumes the previous year, and later Clouzot resumes the French connection with Le Salaire de la Peur. Barranca Airways, South America, where a job means defying nature and taking off through impenetrable fog. "A bird has too much sense to fly in that muck." Between sea and sky is the office-saloon-boarding house that might also be a movie studio, the boss (Cary Grant) presides with gaucho hat and suave sang-froid. Life is lived from one perilous mission to another, one moment you're flirting and soaring and the next you're a pile of mementos and somebody else is eating your steak, the showgirl from Brooklyn (Jean Arthur) witnesses it all with an outsider's shock. "It's like being in love with a buzz saw," fantasy daredevils wouldn't want it any other way. The zenith of Howard Hawks is naturally the zenith of Hollywood, the ultimate refinement of technique and philosophy is an impromptu musical number in a sound-stage evocation of an exotic Neverland. Song keeps death at bay, the barrelhouse piano momentarily drowns out the plane engines outside: "You have to have some crazy way of looking at it to go on." The pragmatic ecstasy of human interaction within balanced frames, of introducing a new face or remembering an old one, of a jar of cold water poured over Rita Hayworth's parted tresses or the anxious crack in Richard Barthelmess' deadpan veneer. The greatest filmic treatment of Conrad has nothing to do with Conrad, Borges provides a splendid reflection in "Story of the Warrior and the Captive." Shakespeare in Spanish and nitroglycerin in the Andes, the romantic declaration of a trick coin and the profound calm of the veteran pilot (Thomas Mitchell) alone with his broken neck. "No looking ahead, no tomorrows. Just today." Hawks knows that perfection is to be discarded once achieved, thus the beautifully shaggy revisions of Rio Bravo and Hatari! Cinematography by Joseph Walker. With Sig Ruman, Allyn Joslyn, Victor Kilian, John Carroll, Don Barry, and Noah Beery Jr. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |