A Film Canon

The strongest aviation film of the 1930s, Only Angels Have Wings is less preoccupied with the relationship between travelling singer Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), and the clique of courier pilots that she encounters in a small South American port, than with the structure and dynamic of the clique itself. At its head is Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), the 'Poppa' of a family as exotic and heterogeneous as its home - an expansive combination of hotel, restaurant, bar and general store that, isolated from its surroundings by the pervasive tropical mist, contains virtually all the ground action. This family is exclusively populated by men, who replace family name with nickname (Kid, Shorty, Baldy, Dutchy, Dex, Sparks) and filial duty with a code encompassing stoicism, professionalism and, above all, a profound, unspoken trust; or, more accurately, a trust whose only tangible index is its inability to be fully articulated, as evinced in Grant's masterful performance, which manages to suggest that speech is both a necessity and a compromise, and would be best limited to radio communication. That said, Jean Arthur's role is also considerable, if only because her eminently pragmatic, resilient screen persona - bolstered, in this case, by being the daughter of a risk-taking trapeze-artist - means that her surrogate masculinity is already a given, while the hyperbolic femininity implicit in her narrative position is deflected onto Judy MacPherson (Rita Hayworth), Carter's ex-lover. This charismatic scenario is complemented by a series of spectacular air sequences, most notably renegade pilot Bat Kilgallon's (Richard Barthelmess) effort to redeem himself by tackling a treacherous mesa.