The Sheila Variations

Only Angels Have Wings: the atmosphere in the first 10 minutes of the film

Only Angels Have Wings is not just a great movie because of the marvelously macho (and almost unbearably cranky) performance of Cary Grant. It's not just great because of the scintillating sexy romance between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. It's not just great because of all of the spectacular (to this day) flying sequences. It's not just great because of the supporting cast, full of classic character actors - Thomas Mitchell, Richard Barthelmess, in a comeback - and then a young and wonderful Rita Hayworth in one of her first major roles.

All of these things do, of course, make the film great.

But if you watch the first 10 minutes, when the ship pulls into the port of Barranca - and you are immersed in the crazy third-world environment of some Latin American country (unnamed, of course) - it is the details and the reality that Howard Hawks puts into those first 10 minutes that elevates the film from something that could be either mawkish, cliched, or over-the-top, into an almost-documentary film milieu.

Hawks has said that all of those pilots were based on people he once knew. Howard Hawks flew planes (his brother was killed flying a plane). Hawks knew these people. He did not populate this film with extras from "Central Casting". He seemed to actually find Mexican and Latin peasants to populate the crowd scenes. There's a bustle and unselfconsciousness to the extras in this film (the kind of thing which is way ahead of its time). It's like Lumet's use of extras, it's a very modern sensibility, where people look like real people, of the actual ethnicities being portrayed.

Jean Arthur, the showgirl, gets off the boat - staring around her at the chaos - the bunches of bananas going by, the girls dancing, the little kids begging, the tables with tacos for sale, things she can't even interpret yet ... and she starts wandering, not realizing (at first) that two guys are following her. We learn very soon that they are two of the "fliers" who work at Cary Grant's small airport - and so they are reckless, and fearless, and macho - just like all of those guys were (and had to be). But before she realizes she is being followed, she just wanders around. And Hawks appears to let his camera just sit ... and people appear to be just behaving as they would if there were no camera there - and let me tell you - with huge crowd scenes, full of extras, that is no small feat. Only Angels Have Wings works on a documentary-level, and even though you know that what you are looking at is a set - and that those people are paid to be in the movie ... it doesn't seem like it. The illusion is total and complete. Hawks starts it out in the streets, and so we always feel the entire world that is surrounding these guys - we always feel the jungle pressing in on them - and also how ODD they are, in that environment. They were daredevils, they died every other day trying to deliver the mail via plane thru mountain passes, they were completely "other", in comparison to the townsfolk around them. The first 10 minutes sets that up perfectly. It sets up everything. Jean Arthur's "game"-ness - she's not a silly woman, a girlie-girl, who needs protection. She can take care of herself. She peeks into saloons, and stares around her, grinning like crazy, loving it.

The film would not work without the first 10 minutes. If the film started with Jean Arthur's first entrance into Dutchie's bar - without that prelude of her wandering the streets - we would not feel that we were looking at a world, rather than a movie.