J Paul Johnson
Even well into its nonagenarian decade, Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels is still a hellacious, audacious spectacle. To modern sensibilities, its characters and dialogue may register a bit trite, its pacing uncertain, but once it takes flight, Hughes’ spendy WWI drama still excites. Centered around a love triangle between two British brothers, both soldiers in the British Royal Flying Corps, and their common love interest, played by teen sensation Jean Harlow, Hell’s Angels offers up some great aerial dogfight sequences and a surprisingly effective resolution to its protagonists’ plight. As the saying goes, “War is Hell,” and Hughes effectively conveys that theme with both combat and conviction. New to The Criterion Collection, Hell’s Angels gets a special edition two-disc 4K UHD release featuring the new restoration of the MagnaScope road-show version of the film.
James Hall and Ben Lyon play the brothers, Roy and Monte Rutledge, respectively, in stark contrast: Roy is the straight arrow with the strong moral compass, dedicated to the cause; Monte is the cavalier playboy, conscripted less willingly and with serious reservations. Further testing them is Harlow as the flighty, flirty bombshell Helen in the role that essentially defined her career. Straightlaced Roy is smitten with Helen, but once dashing Monte arrives on the scene, Helen’s eyes turn towards the playboy. As the two brothers take on more and more important assignments for the RFC, their nerves, skill, and ultimately their fraternal bond are put to the ultimate test.
That the plot of Hell’s Angels is basic in its outline works in its favor, allowing Hughes to focus the film’s climax on a dizzying dogfight with the legendary “Red Baron” and bringing the brothers’ contrasting moral compasses into sharp focus. It’s a serviceable, perfectly functional trope that gives the film a thematic weight that transcends—like any good war movie should—the specifics of its time and place. War films tend to be precise in their geographies and timelines, but they aim towards a universality of theme, and Hells’ Angels is no exception.
More interesting than Hell’s Angels’ plot is its production. Hughes’ movie is a film that intersects with several rapid changes in the industry. It began production as a silent film, but was finished as a talkie, its lead actress getting fired in the transition: Norwegian-American Greta Nissen’s accent was too distinct to pass as British. It is shot mostly in black and white, but includes several cleverly tinted scenes and one full-color sequence filmed in color (the only such scene of Harlow’s entire career). Last, it predates the implementation of the Hays Code, taking full advantage of that liberty to show plenty of its new star’s skin, some surprising violence, frankly sexual situations, and no small amount of salty language.
Curiously enough, all of those work to the film’s advantage, even if its production—presented cinematically in the opening sequence of Martin Scorsese’s Hughes biopic The Aviator, if in a sanitized version—was long, torturous, and costly. Filming began in 1927, but the success of The Jazz Singer that year forced its competitors to add direct dialogue. Hughes changed tack and began reshooting Hell’s Angels as a talkie; he didn’t finish the film until 1930. The costs ran up to nearly three million dollars, much of the expense associated with the dogfights—all shot with dozens of pilots flying real aircraft. Refusing to accept that one of the final stunts was too dangerous, Hughes took command of one plane himself, crashing and concussing himself with a skull fracture and needing facial surgery to heal. During the course of production, three of the production’s stunt pilots and a mechanic were sadly killed.
Films from this first wave of talkies, or direct sound pictures, tend to be curious creatures. During the silent era, directors established a highly emotive and effective grammar of filmmaking with their new medium. Close-ups, parallel editing, simple dialogue cards, and every bit as importantly, nondiegetic music, most typically performed as live accompaniment, all contributed to a remarkable narrative efficiency. Talkies changed that, and not always for the better: the first talkies tended to be, well, “talky,” as if filmmakers forgot suddenly all that they had learned during the silent era in order to accommodate the new technology. The first talkies lost some of the medium’s rich visual expression.
Those first direct-sound films often lost the rich emotions conveyed by their nondiegetic musical scores, as their directors associated such music with silent films and eschewed its use in their talkies. Hughes’ dogfight scenes, for instance, are shot entirely without musical accompaniment, as is most of the film—something practically unthinkable in the decades to come, once filmmakers became more accustomed to the new medium and more fully integrated all of its potential visual and aural modes.
Audio is put to good use, though, with the new challenge of direct sound, especially that of the planes and their artillery fire during the combat sequences, which are surprisingly thrilling even to this day. Hell’s Angels may not offer up anything revelatory in terms of its plot, but its combat sequences are legendary, and the film’s place in history is secure, having launched the career of Harlow as the platinum blond bombshell and made the reputation of Hughes as a maverick, devil-may-care director. The Criterion Collection surely includes better films, especially in this genre, but Hell’s Angels is nonetheless a worthy inclusion as new spine # 1288.
Criterion’s double-disc jewel-case package includes one 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features. The 4K digital restoration is remastered in its original 1.37:1 and 1.54:1 aspect ratios from a duplicate 35mm negative by the NBC/Universal StudioPost preservation team, utilizing the original MagnaScope, Handschiegl stencilling, and Multicolor/Technicolor processes to convey the film’s complex artistry. It’s impressive to see, almost like a Busby Berkeley production filmed with planes in the air. The 4K version offers a significant upgrade in sharpness and clarity from the Blu-ray disc, even if the latter provides the same attention to color as the 4K. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack offers clarity in the dialogue and impact in the combat sequences.
Special Features
There’s no commentary track, which is mildly disappointing given the rich array of topics Hell’s Angels raises, sitting as it does at the intersection of several rapidly changing technologies and emerging careers. But the three featurettes included are excellent.
Robert Legato, the visual-effects supervisor for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, which opens with the making of Hell’s Angels, discusses the groundbreaking aerial visuals of Hughes’ film and puts them into contrast with those of Scorsese’s modern film and its reliance on CGI. This 12-minute interview, filmed new for this release, is informative and engaging, with plenty of clips from both films. Criterion, to its credit—and in contrast to its stated policy and typical pattern—thankfully provides English-language subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, not just for the feature film, but for all three supplements. (Criterion normally does so only for foreign-language supplements but seems, finally, to be changing course to offer more inclusive and accommodating content.)
Farran Smith Nehme, film scholar and critic (aka the “Self-Styled Siren“), offers an informative and empathetic overview of Jean Harlow’s career. Hired without experience at 18 for Hell’s Angels and castigated on set by James Whale (who directed the domestic scenes), Harlow became the face of Hollywood in the 1930s but died tragically of renal failure at age 26. Smith Nehme’s commentary is illustrated with clips from Hell’s Angels and Harlow’s other starring vehicles, publicity stills, and behind-the-scenes images. At 27 minutes, it’s a thorough and delightful featurette.
Outtakes from the film are supplemented with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn. Though there are only a few minutes presented—Hughes reportedly shot, according to Fred Kaplan, 2.5 million feet of film and ultimately used just 15,000—they are of sublime historical importance, featuring Harlow’s first minutes ever captured on a movie set.
The packaging also includes new cover art by Sam Hadley and an introductory essay by Kaplan. It may be easy to imagine a commentary track including the interviewees here—Legato, Smith Nehme, and Stenn, maybe alongside one of Hughes’ biographers or another film historian—but the three featurettes are all excellent, and alongside the new 4K restoration, they make this special edition of Hell’s Angels a delightful addition to The Criterion Collection.
