FILM SOCIETY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 102, 2 May 1931, Page 5 (Supplement)

FILM SOCIETY.

DRAMAS OP THE AIR.

"HELL'S ANGELS"—AND OTHERS.

(By E. CRAN D'ARGENT.)

Within its own limits "Hell's Angels* is the most striking and exciting war film we have yet seen—a veritable epic of the air, that deserves to be called "stupendous." The sequences in the air are done with an extraordinary power and breadth, a superb technique, and a vivid, sometimes even ghastly, realism—do we need the shrieks and writhings of a man trapped in a blaa'ag cockpit? Some of the individjal "stunts" were presented, if not nraro effectively, yet more affectingly, in, "Wings" or "Flight," or even (so long agtr) in "Love Never Dies"—more affectingly, because they concerned peopl* who already interested us. But" here we have a new wild beauty" of cloudscape and moonlight or early sun. And the cumulative effect of tha whole spectacle is overwhelming; tho grim life and fiery death of the Zeppelin, "the navies battling in the central blue," the head-on collision, the 'planes shot to pieces in mid-air or screaming in flame down the sky, the bombing and magnificent explosion of the munitions dump, heap excitement on breathless excitement. Fevered Melodrama. Against all this "glory and horror,** no doubt only fevered melodrama could make itself heard. The story is its own criticism. Packed with situations "stranger than fiction," it brings us to that of the young patriot (American), who, having shot his companion to save the secrets of the Allies, comforts his dying moments, then goes proudly to face the firing party. A noble gesture! Noble, too, if incredible, the Zeppelin observer who, loving England, drops in the Serpentine the bombs destined, for Trafalgar Square (incidentally, why Trafalgar Square?); and noble the Zeppelin crew who for "Kaiser and Vaterland," step overboard that the lightened ship may have a chance to escape. .

It is well to be reminded that ottr poor humanity can rise to these tragic heroisms. And they do something to atone for the too over-sexed and underpsychologised women (I ihean the characters, not their accomplished interpreters), who provide some needlessly squalid love scenes, of some value, no doubt, for "atmosphere" and the exhibition of character, but otherwise an excrescence on the story. But how artificial it all is, in these days when the film has the realism of speech! It matters little that no one incident is in itself impossible. The whole remains a fiction, and moves us far less deeply than the normal war experience of "Journey's End" or "All Quiet," .

American and British.

One inevitably thinks of "The Dawn Patrol," with its similar air-work, on a less tremendous scale, and its even greater beauty of photography and pictorial composition. The "Patrol," even though its dialogue and ' characterisation were thin, was a genuine psychological study; there was a refreshing absence of feminine complications, and the central motive—"the war goes on"—was impressively developed as ose man after another succeeded to the burden of command and the strained agony of sending out his comrades to their death. But both: films show ■Che American directors' extraordinary insensitiveness to British ways of life and thought. Those clever young Americans of ths "Patrol" neither look, nor move, nor behave, nor speak, nor think Eka the British officers whose uniforms they wear.

It may be that a British production would equally falsify American life. But at the present time our directors are showing a more alert intelligence and turning out fresher and more truthful work. Recall for a moment "The W Plan," comparable with these other films in technical skill and pictorial beauty, and fairly comparable in material, in spite of its different theme and different line of thought. It was secret service stuff, with an intellectual rather than emotional appeal, with no heroics and little of the spectacular, with its airsequences purely incidental. But what sure and subtle work! We saw no actual fighting, yet so correct and effective was the military setting that we could never forget (as we easily could in -"The Dawn Patrol") that the story was but one incident of a gigantic war.