Only Angels Have Wings

Saw Only Angels Have Wings, a film about fly-boys in some remote south-american country who risk their necks delivering mail. There's intrigue and romance and so on, but the film is really an exploration of nihilism. The main characters are people who risk their lives on a daily basis. One of their number dramatically and awfully dies in the first quarter of an hour and within minutes, everyone is laughing, drinking, and eating lustily. Our audience-proxy, a pretty woman fresh of the boat is shocked, but then, they can't mourn every death, now can they?

The film has a palpable sense of doom hanging over much of it. We know disaster is lurking and in any film where disaster lurks, the disaster is going to have to strike eventually or we'll feel confused and cheated. This lends a dour air to the proceedings. When the pretty woman is trying to seduce the handsome leader of the camp, her efforts seem less warm and jokey than sad and desperate. The little bits of warm-up tragedy are all the more poignant. At one point the camp leader must ground a pilot for failing his eye-test. Neither one of them really acknowledges it and both adopt a gung-ho, "well that's the way it's got to be" attitude but it is clear that the pilot's heart is breaking.

I found the film really sad. The whole point of the movie however, is that of course death can come at any moment for any of us, but instead of giving in and cringing in fear or perpetually tensing for it, we must celebrate what we have. That I allowed the inevitable sad ending to depress me and to color the proceedings is fairly ironic. I've done exactly what the film was warning against doing! The ending, by the way, is pretty melancholy, but also uplifting and pleasingly ambiguous. We are almost (but not quite) cheated of our gory end.

Although I did indeed find the film depressing, I also found it fun, cute, tense, and well-made. It's a slightly hysterical, lightly philosophical, emotional roller coaster. It's a classy old film and has a lot of goofy 50s-isms (at one point the pretty dame is wearing a bathrobe with shoulder pads. Another time she's wearing one of those trench coats with buttons sewn on right over the nips.) and a good dose of the associated super-sincerity. I'm a total sucker for that stuff though. I try to play along with films and when they're this earnest, well, how can I not get sucked right in? Fun stuff. A good old movie.