Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Romantic Drama
Starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Richard Barthelmess
Directed by Howard Hawks
When the ship San Luis makes a stop at the port of Barranca to deliver mailbags and load bananas, cabaret singer Bonnie Lee leaves the boat for some hours to look around. She meets a gang of American flyers who work for a warm-hearted Dutchman. He is the owner of a scrubby hotel, but also of the shaky Barranca Airways, led by the tough flyer Geoff Carter. The only way to fly out of Barranca is through a deep pass at 14,000 feet above the ground. As the weather is often stormy and foggy, the flights are extremely difficult, and several flyers have already lost their lives. Bonnie falls in love with Geoff, who reminds her of her father, a trapeze artist who worked without safety net. She decides to leave the boat and stay at the hotel. But Geoff is scared of being detained by a woman. He wants to continue his risky lifestyle uninterrupted. The situation is aggravated when a new flyer, Bat MacPherson, turns up with his wife Judy. He once caused the death of a young flyer by leaving a malfunctioning airplane in a parachute, and Judy was once Geoff's girlfriend, who he left because she tried to stop him from making risky flights.
Howard Hawks had known a real-life flier who once parachuted from a burning plane. His co-pilot died in the ensuing crash and his fellow pilots shunned him for the rest of his life.
Richard Barthelmess had deep scars that resulted from an infection due to plastic surgery. The only way to cover them up was with heavy make-up, but Howard Hawks convinced him to leave them the way they were because "those scars tell the story and are important to your character." Hawks also removed planks to make Barthelmess appear smaller, to reflect his character's inferiority among his fellow pilots.
In this film, Richard Barthelmess plays a pilot who is shunned because he jumped out of a plane and left his mechanic to die. In The Last Flight (1931), he played a pilot who goes down with his plane to NOT leave his friend behind.
The film was inspired by a true story of a real-life couple Howard Hawks met while scouting Mexican locations for Viva Villa! (1934) (which was eventually directed by Jack Conway).
Howard Hawks remembered that when the movie was released, "a certain critic said 'It's the only picture Hawks ever made that didn't have any truth in it.' I wrote him a letter and said, 'Every blooming thing in that movie was true.' I knew the men that were in it and everything about it. But it was just where truth was stranger than fiction."
Barranca could well be based on the Colombian port city of Barranquilla. The town was close enough to Panama to be a stop for the banana boats mentioned, yet near enough to the Andes mountain range to provide a barrier for transport to neighbouring Venezuela or Brazil should the weather change.