Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

What the trade papers reported

The Canadian Moving Picture Digest of 24 Jun 1939 listed the film at the Capitol in Winnipeg and the Capitol in Vancouver, in both cases as “starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.” Its issue of 19 Aug 1939 had the film in Vancouver again, at the Dominion, on a bill with Juarez. That same issue named the other seven Cannes selections, among them The Wizard of Oz, Union Pacific and Stanley and Livingstone, and said four more would be picked on the advice of the American Embassy. Wikipedia’s entry puts the Cannes selection at 12 American films and says the festival was canceled as World War II approached.

The Box Office Digest’s 1940 annual printed the 119 figure twice, under Harry Cohn’s producer credits and under Hawks in its producer-directors’ list. In Cohn’s list, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington stood at 167 and Golden Boy at 102, and the list averaged 91. The annual’s own note explains its scale through Jesse James, which at 182 ran 82% above normal business. Its table of the Big Ten pictures of 1939 does not include Only Angels Have Wings, although it does include Gunga Din with Grant at $3,100,000 and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with Arthur at $2,700,000. Wikipedia’s entry on the film disagrees with that table, calling it the third-highest-grossing film of 1939 and giving its total as over one million dollars, with $143,000 from its first two weeks at Radio City Music Hall.

The reviews

Wikipedia’s entry summarizes two reviews from the release. Frank S. Nugent wrote in The New York Times that Hawks had “staged his flying sequences brilliantly,” and credited the “amiable performing talents” of Grant, Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Barthelmess and Sig Rumann. Abel Green of Variety compared the film favorably to Flight From Glory and praised Barthelmess. Among later reviewers, Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent praised the aerial sequences, and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it 4 stars out of 5 and called it “eccentric and entertaining.” Metacritic shows 86 out of 100 from 10 critics, and Rotten Tomatoes shows 100% from 32 reviews.

Later accounts

The 2022 Sight and Sound poll placed the film in a tie for 122nd, and the Library of Congress named it to the National Film Registry in 2017. Dave Kehr called it the “equilibrium point” of Hawks’s career, linking his early 1930s themes to his darker work of the 1940s and 1950s. Critics at Cahiers du Cinéma held up the film in the 1950s as support for the auteur theory. Roy Davidson and Edwin C. Hahn were nominated for the Academy Award for special effects, and Wikipedia’s entry adds that the film reached a preliminary list for black-and-white cinematography without a nomination.

Radio took up the story twice. Orson Welles and Joan Blondell starred in a version on The Campbell Playhouse on February 25, 1940, and before that Grant, Arthur, Hayworth, Barthelmess and Mitchell had repeated their parts on Lux Radio Theatre on May 29, 1939. The film itself had opened at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles on May 10, 1939, twelve days after its last re-shoots, and had its official world premiere at Radio City Music Hall the next day.

Wikipedia’s account of the aircraft says Paul Mantz flew a Boeing Model 40 biplane in an aerobatic scene that repeated his work in Flight from Glory. A prop model of the Hamilton aircraft surfaced in 2007 on the U.S. Antiques Roadshow, and its owner had matched it to the screen. The same account of the shoot says main shooting ended on March 24, 1939, 31 days behind schedule, after cameras first rolled on December 19, 1938, at the Columbia Studio Ranch. Hawks worked in story order when he could. The second unit then spent several weeks filming aircraft around the western United States. April retakes involved Grant and Victor Kilian, and Charles Vidor directed two days of re-shoots with Hayworth.

In a 1972 interview, Arthur said she loved “sinking my head into Cary Grant’s chest.” Years after the shoot, having seen Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, she apologized to Hawks and said she finally understood what he had wanted. On the set the two had argued, and she was uneasy with his coaching toward a variation of the Hawksian woman, until she gave in unhappily. Hawks had chosen her after watching her in Frank Capra’s films, and he later said she had been good in the film.

Wikipedia’s production history calls this Hayworth’s breakout role as well as her first major one, and notes a Look magazine cover after the film’s success. Hawks first gave Judy to Dorothy Comingore. Cohn had been grooming a young starlet, and with his backing her agent insisted Hawks screen-test Hayworth, who won the part. The same account says Barthelmess was a disputed choice because an operation under his eyes had gone wrong and left X-shaped scars. He usually hid them with heavy make-up, and Hawks wanted them used for the character. Barthelmess’s own entry calls this his most notable late character part, the disgraced flier married to Hayworth’s character. Wikipedia also notes that Grant calls after that character with “Judy, Judy,” the nearest he came on film to the misquotation attached to him.

The script stayed unfinished through the shoot, by Wikipedia’s account, with Hawks and Jules Furthman doing most of the rewriting and Eleanore Griffin and William Rankin contributing. Hawks had been struck by aviation staff he met in Mexico while scouting Viva Villa! He reworked the scenario himself from a story he wrote in 1938, Plane from Barranca. The original outline was Anne Wigton’s, under the working title Plane No. 4.