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ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS

Howard Hawks United States, 1939
Only Angels Have Wings is one of the standouts of [Hawks'] impressive career, but also one of his most sobering films. With a frank attitude towards death and a romantic yet melancholy view of life on the edge, it's an existentially tough work of blunt philosophy.
April 18, 2016
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The bench depth of this ensemble is essential to the film's success as romantic fantasy, and to its vitality as popular art. It has become a critical commonplace to say that Hawks operated in top gear when perfecting the personae of luminaries like Grant, Bogart, and John Wayne. But in Only Angels Have Wings, Grant serves as the core of a group character... The film's action hinges on two deaths in the company. Its tension comes from seeing whether a couple of newcomers can fill the void.
April 12, 2016
Viewed through an auteurist lens, 1939's Only Angels Have Wings may be Hawks' most quintessential feature, yet no other film of his looks like it, not even his handful of aviation movies. Gone are the unobtrusive frames of simple, focused blocking in natural interior and landscape settings, replaced instead by crowded, cluttered images that situate everything in a confined space where everything outside the line of sight may as well be mapped with nothing but "here there be dragons.
April 12, 2016
Movie Morlocks
As the film unwinds I find myself getting caught up in the romance once again, with Bonnie forthright and honest in her feelings, and Geoff withholding, cruel, and devilishly handsome. The ending is of joyful sadness. Geoff expresses love through the flipping of a coin, the realization of which spreads across Bonnie's face like a new dawn. But they will all have to go to work the following day, their jobs guaranteeing no happiness past the present, reckless moment.
April 12, 2016
Hawks expresses the film's neuroses within the exciting flying scenes, which suggest masturbation (men display their prowess up in the air, alone, isolated), within the memorable setting, an elaborate fusion of bar, post office, restaurant, and unofficial town hall, and, of course, with the endlessly inventive dialogue, courtesy of the cast and screenwriter Jules Furthman.
April 12, 2016
That this glorious amalgam of romance, adventure, melodrama, and musical doesn't have a loftier reputation is to some degree understandable—even more than most of Hawks' films, it's an ode to pragmatism and professionalism, dismissing almost any powerful display of emotion as an admission of weakness. That sensibility only appeals to a very particular mindset… but for those viewers, Only Angels Have Wings achieves a seismic force that conventionally open-hearted movies can't hope to match.
April 9, 2016
While the fragility of such emotional safeguarding is tested in the latter stages of the film, as elsewhere in Hawks' work actual meaning is often tacitly expressed, it's gesture and action that do the real talking. The patter may at times move as fast as the director's later screwball movies, but a shared cigarette says more than pages of dialogue.
May 15, 2015
It's a solid melodrama with a brawling sense of place that hasn't entirely stood the test of time.
May 15, 2015
Such picaresque adventure yarns were Hawks's specialty, and he invests these characters' lives—the supporting players include a chorus girl (Jean Arthur), a disgraced pilot seeking redemption (silent-era icon Richard Barthelmess), and a loyal sidekick (the invaluable Thomas Mitchell)—with tectonic emotion. His clichés, like Shakespeare's, are startling in their familiarity, not derivative but foundational.
November 5, 2014
To Be (Cont'd)
Few passages in movies affect me as deeply as the lengthy opening of Howard Hawks's 1939 romance-adventure Only Angels Have Wings. I'm at a loss to explain exactly why, and I think that's key to its greatness—I can only ever talk around these ineffably mysterious thirty minutes and change... There are days when I would call this cinema's most powerful and perfect vision of community.
November 1, 2014
Thanks for the Use of the Hall
One's first thought might be that Hawks benefitted from an evocative visual plan, courtesy of Lionel Banks' art design and Joseph Walker's dazzling, Oscar-nominated cinematography. But Hawks exploits that plan with a directorial freedom greater than he had previously permitted himself. More than ever before in his work, we experience the set as an actors' hangout, a place to linger over drinks, to come together in musical interludes, to catnap while waiting for the mail plane to return.
August 26, 2009
The dominant attitude is a macho American version of French existentialism, which also found voice in the contemporaneous literature of Ernest Hemingway... but Hawks is confident where Hemingway is fatalistic, finding splendor in the friendships and character quirks that blossom on the edge of chaos. The film is brimming with life, as Hawks' long takes suggest a community vibrant enough to speak for itself, though it is unafraid to confront sudden death with grown-up seriousness.
November 21, 2008