|
The pet cockroach and the dangling torpedo, pockets of grit under MGM's crust of glamour. England during the Great War, an estate purchased by the wandering Yank (Gary Cooper), "neutral... rich... out of things." The heiress (Joan Crawford) is equally close to her childhood beau (Robert Young) and her brother (Franchot Tone), both officers in the Royal Navy. The American becomes a pilot and turns the trio into a quartet, or quintet if his flying buddy (Roscoe Karns) is included. Combat on the French coast sorts things out. "Some guy has said that a brave man is a fool who doesn't know when to be scared." Howard Hawks has William Faulkner himself for his little Hemingway send-up, with British terseness pushed into abrupt blank verse. Death is a strange thing, the bomber presumed fallen turns up alive and well at the ambulance volunteer's doorstep, an insect gets a miniature funeral. Man paces outside the hospital room where a wounded confrere lies, a drink is brought in ("Any guy that wants whiskey ain't dead, is he?") and swiftly returned, the friend gulps it. (Renoir observes a variation of this in La Grande Illusion.) Turgid matters on land, exhilaration up in the air and out in the water. Raid on the German ammunition compound, a flurry of planes "like mosquitoes in September" and a grinning twerp for gunner. The same overexcited fellow is later blinded during a boat attack, leading to the remarkable moment when Young and Tone bid farewell to the sleeping Crawford ("Look at her while I'm touching you") before keeping their sacrificial rendezvous with an enemy battleship. Borzage brings back half of the principals for the revision of Three Comrades. With Louise Closser Hale, Rollo Lloyd, and Hilda Vaughn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |