Night Flight

Night Flight (1933)

Runtime: 84 minutes

Directed by: Clarence Brown

Starring: John and Lionel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery

From: MGM

I've finally returned and I picked out another hard to find title that happens to be on Warner Archive Instant. Onto the Letterboxd review, after I tell you that I'll return tomorrow night.

In my last few days of having Warner Archive Instant (I'll subscribe to it again; that'll just be sometime next year) I decided to watch this film due to its strong cast (Barrymore Squared in John and Lionel, Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, and in a minor role Myrna Loy), its plot involving one day in “South America”-actually Southern California and Colorado-where a polio outbreak has happened and there has to be a then-dangerous flight at night done by airmail pilots in order to transport the medicine from Chile back to Brazil. There's more to it than that but now you know the gist of the plot

The movie also was nearly impossible to find for decades due to copyright issues but that got settled a few years ago. Was it worth the wait? Well... I say it's average overall. It's not awful but with the cast you'd expect better. It happens that a lot of the focus is on Barrymore Squared, which doesn't sound bad due to their talent but the other people get short shrift; for example, Loy only has a few scenes and that's it. Instead you concentrate on John as a huge A-hole boss of the airmail company and Lionel as the poor sap who has to enforce John's edicts.

The movie is quite melodramatic; maybe it's overdramatic but it's up to interpretation. After all the first thing you see is a pretty sick young boy. At least the flying scenes are pretty nice for the time but like I said it's just average overall, when you'd hope for something better. Many of the stars don't even really interact with each other. Those are the breaks, I guess. Maybe the novel from Antoine de Saint-Exupery was better.