Rating: 4.5/5
Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a piano entertainer, steps off a banana boat in Barranca, a fictional port town near the Andes mountains. She encounters two pilots, Joe and Les, who offer her a drink, bringing her to their local hang, Dutchy’s Bar. There, Bonnie meets Han Solo prototype Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), the boss of their air mail delivery service
Geoff sends Joe on a dangerous delivery in deep fog. When the weather turns, they try to route Joe back to the airway. But the plane crashes, and he dies. Bonnie is dismayed to see how unsympathetic the other men are — the men scavenge what personal items of Joe they can recover and divvy them up between each other
Bonnie learns that the mail delivery business is failing and that Geoff doesn’t know what to do. Geoff goes on a flight, expecting Bonnie to have boarded her ship and left, but when he returns, she is there, waiting a week for the next boat so that she can spend time with Geoff
Things get heated when Geoff hires Bat MacPherson, a man known for his cowardice who abandoned a crashing plane with another pilot still in it. If that isn’t enough, Bat’s wife Judy (Rita Hayworth) is an old fling of Geoff’s and perhaps the heartbreaker that turned him into the stone man we see
The film follows the pilot crew as they try to make their deliveries and possibly save the company. The movie has a hangout vibe — so much of it takes place at Dutchy’s, watching character dynamics play out. The men are comrades who like each other, are good at their job, and they suffer the crap pay to participate in this group
Pilots delivering mail used to call themselves the Suicide Club because of how dangerous it was and how often people died doing it — ex-WWI pilots looking for work, like Geoff
The miniature work is terrific for 1939 — they built incredible sets and crashed so many model planes to get the crashes they show in the movie — they used bicycle rigs to pilot the miniatures so that they turned and glided more realistically
And they do have actual flights as well — the cinematographer had a special camera that could dynamically move and still allow him to fly his plane
The movie doesn’t use non-diegetic music — the airplanes starting, taking off, and radio communication make up the sound field
Overall, this is Howard Hawks at the highest command of his art, combining his flight expertise and deft character direction to combine adventure, romance, and comedy into a beautiful little movie