Flight Of The Banana Cowboys. Fleeting Thoughts On Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings.

The first “landing” in Howard Hawks’ 1939 movie Only Angels Have Wings is one of the best action scenes I’ve ever seen. And yet you see nothing. The whole sequence essentially revolves around the sight unseen, echoing and aping the psychology of the film’s protagonists, and the men that we will go on to follow for the remainder of the picture’s running time. It sets up the scenario for the danger that it is, with a band of men that showcase a rejection of mortality, men that fear nothing bar being shunned by a pretty face.

Only Angels Have Wings deviates just that far enough from the screwball conventions of the films Hawks made around it with Cary Grant to render it something else entirely. I actually found it to be a little nihilistic in parts, which came as a surprise, a curiously so for a filmmaker who once said “I don’t believe in killing people and making a film end on death.”. He does precisely that here in Only Angels Have Wings, with the results, again in his own words, “very successful”. It’s at once somehow both a departure for the filmmaker and his defining work. The balance of spirit and pathos is measured just fine, while the action sequences, if you’ll excuse the pun, soar. That aforementioned opening sequence is presented largely via sound and the spectacle of the third-party witness, as opposed to the act being enacted itself, lending a layered, almost meta feel to to proceedings. We’re watching the watchmen, who themselves cannot see for an obstructive layer of fog between the player and the image.