Following the filming of Frank 'spig' Wead's successful Broadway play Ceiling Zero, Warner Brothers got one of the stars of that film Pat O'Brien, to star in a Wead screenplay about the creation of the famous China Clipper, the plane that made the first passenger run from San Francisco to the Orient. Back in the day it excited the American public no end.
Wead based his lead character on a World War I aviation hero who went into the commercial flying business, Eddie Rickenbacker. But he invested a lot of himself in O'Brien's character as well.
That's what struck me watching China Clipper today. The scenes with O'Brien and his estranged wife Beverly Roberts reminded me a whole lot of the plot for Wings of Eagles which is John Ford's biographical tribute to Spig Wead. It was like Wead himself through O'Brien was trying to justify his single minded attention to aviation to the neglect of wife and family.
Humphrey Bogart, Ross Alexander and Henry B. Walthall are O'Brien's associates. This was Walthall's farewell screen performance. He collapsed on set and died shortly thereafter. I'm not sure if the film was rewritten to accommodate Walthall's demise or his death was originally part of the story. Whatever it is, it is spookily coincidental.
Marie Wilson plays her usual dumb Dora with eyes for Ross Alexander, in this one she got a bit annoying I have to say.
Bogart was not especially fond of this film though it was a change from the gangster thugs he was doing then. He plays another flier at loggerheads with O'Brien.
The scenes involving the flights were well done, much better than in Ceiling Zero, though that had a better story.
China Clipper is a routine action adventure film from Warner Brothers, yet viewed together with Wings of Eagles it does kind of take on a whole new meaning.
