Tales From the Warner Archives #7: "The Last Flight" (William Dieterle, 1931)

As I myself get older, I bristle at the phrase “old movies” more and more. My first prin­ciple that un vrai film est un vrai film allows no room for what some might call ageist hier­arch­ies. I get shirty even when the issue is raised in a rel­at­ively innoc­u­ous fash­ion. I remem­ber going on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN back in 2003 to flog Première’s “Hottest Sex Scenes” fea­ture, and the very gra­cious Mr. Cooper men­tioned, in a gen­i­al tone, that the top five pic­tures on the list were, and I quote, “rel­at­ively older movies.” Hardly an unreas­on­able observation—the films in the top five were Blow-Up, Some Like It Hot, …And God Created Woman, Vixen, and Last Tango In Paris (and this is what you get when you allow the likes of myself to be the sole arbit­er and author of such a list, by the way; none of that Indecent Proposal bull­shit for me, no sir­ree). And I gave him a reasoned, reas­on­able answer. But I remem­ber think­ing, with a little bit of hos­til­ity, “What do you mean by older, posh boy? You and Blow-Up are pretty much the same age.” I’m like that, what can I tell you. 

All this is by way of pre­fa­cing the state­ment of fact that The Last Flight, dir­ec­ted by German émigré Dieterle from an adapt­a­tion by John Monk Saunders of his nov­el Single Woman, is what you might call an ines­cap­ably old film. As not­able and frank and mov­ing as it is, it does creak rather con­spicu­ously at times, and that’s life. And if you can get around—or bet­ter still, actu­ally appreciate—that, it’s a ter­rific­ally note­worthy movie experience. 

Flight, based in part on Saunder’s own exper­i­ences (a World War I avi­at­or, he also wrote Wellman’s clas­sic Wings, and won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol), tells the story of a group of dam­aged American Great War vets galivant­ing their way through Paris and Spain, fueled by massive amounts of liquor and all pur­su­ing the same expat lovely, the enig­mat­ic Nikki (a lovely Helen Chandler). Yes, the storyline does sound famil­i­ar, and yes, there is a bull­fight­ing scene in here…Yes, Saunders’ Single Lady would seem to owe a lot to Papa’s The Sun Also Rises, pub­lished in 1926, but what we’re likely look­ing at here are accounts of near-parallel exist­ences, rather than text theft. 

The ringlead­er of the black-tie sport­ing group of heart­broken would-be wolves in this pic­ture is Cary, played by silent film super­star Richard Barthelmess, and again he here puts paid to the too-much per­pet­rated myth that he could­n’t carry a talk­ing pic­ture. The act­ing styles here are pretty much all on the slightly over­em­phas­iz­ing side of the silent mode, but the performances—Cary’s pals are played by a group of the era’s stars and future stars, names undreamt of in the Twitterific Kidcrits’™ philo­sophy, includ­ing Johnny Mack Brown and David Manners—are all earn­est, unforced. 

One aspect of the film that’s rather bra­cingly prom­in­ent is its treat­ment of what I believe was not quite yet known as alco­hol­ism. “What should I drink now, I sup­pose?” is a con­stant refrain with these char­ac­ters, and they’re all pretty expli­cit about the fact that they’re look­ing for strong mood uplift­ers. Nikki is con­stantly won­der­ing what such and such a cock­tail is going to do for her. “It’ll make you bark like a fox,” Cary advises at one point. “But I don’t want to bark like a fox.” “It’ll make you laugh and play.” Yes—laugh and play is what these char­ac­ters all want to do, and they think the drink is gonna help, and it nev­er, ever does. Looking at one of Cary’s crew, miser­able in his cups, Nikki asks Cary what’s going to finally help the guy get bet­ter. “He’ll have to be…reborn,” Cary says rue­fully. It’s a strik­ing line, espe­cially so when one puts togeth­er that this film was made about five years before the offi­cial found­ing of Alcoholics Anonymous, a recov­ery group that pos­its a “spir­itu­al awaken­ing”  as key to a pro­gram of sobri­ety. Kind of in the same ball­park as a rebirth, I’d say. But such an option seems defin­it­ively out of most of these char­ac­ters’ reaches, and Nikki and Cary end up togeth­er more or less via attrition—all of Cary’s com­rades go by the way­side, vic­tims of their war trauma and their power­less­ness over alco­hol. (And Saunders him­self took his own life in 1940.)

One of those com­pan­ions, Francis, seen above with the gun, is played by Elliott Nugent, who went on to become a very accom­plished and cel­eb­rated play­wright and dir­ect­or (he helmed the Bob Hope ver­sion of The Cat and the Canary, which I get all excited about here). Nugent also went on to have his own har­row­ing exper­i­ences with drink­ing and depres­sion, which he recounts with admir­able cour­age in his 1965 mem­oir Events Leading Up To The Comedy. Among the most heart­break­ing bits in the account is his telling of the last days of his friend, the great James Thurber (with whom Nugent col­lab­or­ated on the play The Male Animal), and what Thurber turned into as he “began his daily five-o-clock drink­ing.” “He began to work on a bit­ter auto­bi­o­graphy to be called What Happened To Me. […] ‘This will be the real truth, for the first time,’ he told me. ‘I can­’t hide any more behind the mask of com­edy that I’ve used all my life. People are not funny; they are vicious and horrible—and so is life!’ ”

As for Nugent him­self, he ends Events thusly: “I am learn­ing to try to for­give myself, so much as is with­in my power. Pray for me, dear grandchildren—and for all good people of whatever reli­gion who live in this lovely and often fright­en­ing world; God knows we need such petitions.”