Hell's Angels

I saw this film (movie) in about 1933 and still remember every scene. Without the use of bad language it conveyed the fear,excitement,and gallantry of the time. The German evil was perhaps overplayed,but it was made just a very few years after the War. The flying scenes were dramatic and at least as effective as any made in recent years.

Is it possible to obtain a copy?if so where.

With the release of "The Aviator" there will be renewed, and well deserved, interest in this classic. Hell's Angels holds together surprisingly well for a 75 year old film. Sure there is the over-emoting one would expect from a film that bridges the era between silents and talkies, but the character development is good, the flight scenes are amazing and the story holds the attention from beginning to end. And we haven't even talked about Jean Harlow!! There can be no doubt that Howard Hughes was a genius, a perfectionist, and that he set out to, and did, produce of of the greatest movies of all time. The most expensive film of it's day, and worth every penny.

I saw this movie many years ago, and just tonight on DVD. Wow. This film has been remastered by the UCLA Archives, and the sound is very clear. Clear enough, that you can hear some rather explicit language coming from Monte during the dogfight sequence. And if you understand German, there is even more. Definitely before the Code. This is a Great film, and for those who would criticize the acting, editing, etc, compare it to other films made during the first years of the "talkie era." It stands up very well. Pay special attention to the wounded pilots as they are dying in their planes. Very gritty. The realism of the aerial battles has never been equaled. This film is a true classic. How many other classic films circa 1930 come to mind? Not many.

Howard Hughes produced and directed (with a little help from Edmund Goulding and Howard Hawks) this 1930 aerial extravaganza, whose plot is both hackneyed and largely irrelevant, since one is merely waiting for the heavy melodrama to end so as to feast one's eyes on Jean Harlow and aerial combat scenes. The photography is magnificent, and one gets a kind of God's eye view of reenactments of World War I dogfights. The leading actors, Ben Lyon and James Hall, playing brothers, give such intense performances as to suggest at times that they are not merely emotionally but romantically attached to one another. Those old-fangled airplanes are something to see, as is a gigantic zeppelin, and the combat scenes, full of billowing clouds, the sky full of airplanes that resemble orange crates with wings, buzzing and whistling through the air like flies, are the stuff of dreams, and make this otherwise turgid movie come alive and live in one's mind long after it's over.

My roommates and I saw a few minutes of this many years ago, and we spent weeks poring over TV listings and video rentals to find more of this movie. We were not disappointed. The aerial combat scenes are, quite simply, the most astounding ever. Some scenes show DOZENS of REAL airplanes roiling in a frighteningly tight ball like a cloud of gnats, and barely missing each other. 3 pilots died filming this movie. I'm forever spoiled for the safe choreography, heavy editing, and airplane-free skies of Top Gun... Hell's Angels has real pilots doing really scary stuff. Real planes crashing into real hillsides, not "drifting behind a sand dune and then setting off a gasoline pot."

I now scoff at the computer-generated zeppelin scenes in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." Howard Hughes kicked their butts over 70 years earlier.

Some of the movie is melodramatic and dated, but some human scenes are brutally harsh, powerful, and would never get filmed today because they're TOO chilling.

A really stunning movie, which not only holds up, but betters today's air movies.