Air Mail

Universal pre-coder, directed by John Ford, about the dramatic goings-on at an air mail base. Ralph Bellamy runs the place and has his hands full with arrogant new pilot Pat O'Brien. In future films similar to this, O'Brien would play the Bellamy part of the responsible straight-arrow while James Cagney played the reckless hotshot. So it's interesting to see him playing against his (later) typecasting here. Fine performances from Bellamy and O'Brien. Good support from Gloria Stuart, Slim Summerville, Lilian Bond, David Landau, and Leslie Fenton. Nice special effects and flying sequences. Not quite as good as Night Flight but right up there as one of my favorite aviation films from the '30s.

John Ford directed this look at the US Air Mail Service, from Universal Pictures. Ralph Bellamy stars as Mike Miller, the tough boss of an air mail station and supervisor over a number of pilots. The hazards are many, and turnover in the ranks is frequent as many pilots crash, permanently injuring themselves or, more likely, dying. After one such death, hot-shot former war ace Duke Talbot (Pat O'Brien) joins the service and immediately starts rubbing everyone the wrong way, with the exception of the wife of a fellow pilot, whom he tries to rub the right way, causing even more trouble in the ranks. But when the chips are down, Duke may be the only one who can save the day. What's interesting here is that Pat O'Brien is playing the kind of arrogant character James Cagney played in 1936's Ceiling Zero, where in that same film Pat O'Brien is the tough talking supervisor of pilots.

The highlight here is the aerial footage, with some excellent shots from under the planes while doing low-flying aerobatics. Some rear-projection and miniature work is antiquated, though. There's a lot of the typical "men in close, stressful quarters" type of dialogue and camaraderie, which comes off as more genuine than the attempts at melodrama involving infidelity. The movie serves as a nice snapshot of a type of work, and the characters who worked it, that are now distant history.

Emotionally touching movie. It shows that our lives are all about our interactions.

If any of you have seen John Ford's tribute biography to Spig Wead The Wings Of Eagles, you'll recall that Ward Bond plays a director modeled on Ford who is contacting former flier Wead to write a screenplay of an aviation film he's planning to do. For some reason Airmail has not been readily available for the public in years, but fortunately I did get to see a copy and now know what Ford and Wead were negotiating for.

Airmail stars Pat O'Brien and Ralph Bellamy as a hotshot pilot and the supervisor of an airport in the western USA. O'Brien curiously enough is playing the kind of role that James Cagney would have been cast in the many collaborations those two did at Warner Brothers where O'Brien would sign in the following year. Bellamy in turn is playing a typical Pat O'Brien role, the authority figure who has to take the wind out of Cagney's sails.

Airmail does live up to Spig Wead's hopes and dreams of a tribute to the men who flew these crates delivering the mail. As airplanes got better and safer mail delivery got to be taken for granted. But putting an airmail stamp on a letter meant in the early Thirties you were asking a pilot to risk his life so your loved ones could get news from you. The film was extremely timely as in 1932 the topic of air safety was a big one as news of pilot crashes of mail planes seemed to be occurring regularly.

O'Brien who has no hesitation in letting everyone know he's the best at what he does, starts an affair with Lillian Bond the unhappily married wife of fellow pilot Russell Hopton. This isn't a first for either O'Brien or Bond. Later on Hopton is killed, one among the many deaths in Airmail.

The climax has O'Brien flying a rescue mission for Bellamy who with a lack of pilots takes an Airmail plane up to deliver the mail what happens is for you to see Airmail, but it's along the lines of several Cagney/O'Brien films.

Speaking of which Cagney and O'Brien a few years later starred in the screen adaption of Spig Wead's Broadway play Ceiling Zero. That one is rather static owing to a bad cross over from stage to screen. Airmail is qualitatively better.

And while the special effects are ancient, the drama is real and contemporary. Try to see this rarely seen Ford feature when it's broadcast. It was strange to see O'Brien in a Cagney part, but he acquitted himself well.

I have nothing further to add M. Dumonteil's perceptive remarks on "Air Mail", but I just want to say that this film is criminally neglected among Ford's works. I just saw it for the first time in years and I really loved it very much. When I first saw it about 3 years ago, I didn't care for it that much. But now I think it is one of Ford's most stirring and beautiful masterworks. "Air Mail" will inevitably be compared to Hawks' masterful "Only Angels Have Wings" but Hawks' film is closer to the romantic exoticism of Josef von Sternberg, whereas Ford's shows the influence of Murnau. Of course, Ford surpassed this early effort many times in his career but it should not be missed. It should be a fascinating companion to Ford's "The Wings of Eagles", a superb biography of Frank Weade, the scenarist of "Air Mail".