Only Angels Have Wings, and The Talk of the Town

So I spent the earlier part of the day catching up on taped television programs, doing laundry, and doing things around the house (er, apartment). Around 2 pm, there was a fellow going from door-to-door, saying that they'd be shutting down the power for several hours this afternoon due to a bad transformer down the block. I quickly checked the schedule, and decided that I'd have just enough time to get to the Stanford Theatre for the double feature. So off I went.

I was 5-10 minutes late for the first show, but it turned out not to be a big deal.

Today's double feature was a pair of Cary Grant/Jean Arthur films from circa 1940. The first was Only Angels Have Wings (1939), in which Grant plays Geoff Carter, who runs an airline company in South America for his friend Dutchy (Sig Ruman). The airport is mainly responsible for ferrying the mail to and from the next city, through a mountain pass and often inclimate weather. Their fleet of planes is old and it's not a rare thing for a pilot to die in the line of duty.

The film opens with Bonnie Lee (Arthur), who seems to be a young photographer, arriving at the airport to wait for her boat. While there she catches the eye of a couple of young pilots, one of whom dies trying to impress her. In the aftermath of the tragedy, she and Carter fall for each other, but each is reluctant to admit it. Later on, a new pilot arrives who turns out to have a shady background. Moreover, he's married to Carter's old flame (Rita Hayworth), which injects more drama into the situation.

Only Angels Have Wings is a complex episodic drama with a large cast and terrific visuals. The settings are superb, from the airport to the lookout post in the mountain pass, to some of the location footage used for the flying sequences. The effects for the flights are quite good for the era, making good use of both live-action and miniature shots. While the acting by-and-large is not standout, Grant himself does turn in a fine performance in a very serious role, with very little of the mugging or hamming it up which you see (if only for a few scenes) in many of his other films. Arthur is also fairly good, although something about her voice grated on me. Hayworth, on the other hand, is stunningly beautiful (although she doesn't have a lot to do in the acting department).

You can't really pin the film down to just a single theme; there's a lot going on here. The tension between the thrill of flying for the aviators vs. the danger of that experience, and what their loved ones think about the risks. Being self-reliant vs. turning oneself into an island. Responsibility towards ones' friends and comrades. Making up for past mistakes. Many of the most powerful scenes involve the ostracized flyer, Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess), who Carter uses for some of their most dangerous missions, and about whom you wonder if he'll end up paying for his past mistakes, although he doesn't seem like a bad fellow (certainly not a villain).

I enjoyed this film a lot. Check it out.

The back half of the twin bill was The Talk of the Town, in which Grant plays Leopold Dilg, a man in a small city who's on trial for arson and murder, but who escapes and hides in the attic of a rental cottage run by a local woman, Nora Shelley (Arthur). On the evening that Dilg hides away - with a bum ankle, yet - the cottage's new tenant, Law Professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), shows up early.

Most of the film is played broadly as situational comedy, as Nora - who's sure that Dilg is innocent - tries to hide him from Lightcap and others who comes through the house (including the police). As I generally loathe situational comedy, I found myself squirming in my seat through these scenes, and almost got up and walked out early on. I kept thinking what a bonehead Shelley seemed to be behaving like, and how she seemed to make the worst possible choices and excuses at every turn. (You'd think she could have at least stood up to Lightcap and said, sorry, the cottage isn't ready until tomorrow, you'll have to get a hotel tonight.)

As the film progresses, Shelley worms her way into becoming Lightcap's cook and secretary, and takes dictation for the book he's come to the countryside to write. Dilg hears his dictation and appears to debate practical vs. philosophical issues of law with him, under the hasty cover of the cottage's gardener. From this point the film becomes one about the contrasting virtues and drawbacks of treating the written law as king against how the law is usually implemented by lawyers, judges, politicians, and the public mob, as everything heads in the direction of a resolution of Dilg's situation.

I overall was not terribly fond of this film, as I didn't find it terribly funny (though many others in the audience laughed at what I felt were very weak jokes) and I found the legal issues to be preachy at best. It had a few good moments, but only a few. Even the ultimate resolution of the triangle between Dilg, Shelley and Lightcap was hastily and unsatisfactorily resolved, I felt.

Grant's acting was perhaps at its hammiest, and Arthur seemed largely on the edge of having a nervous breakdown. Colman did a credible job, and a few scenes used his über-elegant attitude to comic effect, but by and large I felt he was a bit out of place here. I kept thinking, "This seems more like a job for Rex Harrison." Hmm.

So, I can't recommend this film.

Between last night and tonight I read Dorothy Sayers' novel Whose Body?, the first Peter Wimsey book.

And boy, is it ever a different story from the two later ones I've read! Aside from being shorter (just over 200 pages), the story is quite straightforward and told with fewer of Sayers' usual embellishments. Despite this, she does have enough of her later style to make a pointed criticism of Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries, wherein everything is laid out neatly for the reader. Wimsey at one point says straight out that people never cough up a neat collection of evidence all at once, but usually have it dragged out of them bit-by-bit over hours or days of discussions, possibly many such talks. Shortly thereafter, Sayers illustrates this principle in an extended dialogue between two characters, though she does wrap up the mystery with a handy confession at the end.

The characters' speech patterns are very different here. Whereas in later books, Wimsey speaks with a formal, always-polite, and educated tone, here he often speaks in words with the last letter missing (bein', havin', smellin', etc.), and his tone is more stereotypically British than otherwise. It makes for a strange read, since today in the US I think we're inclined to see some of his speech patterns as lower class, which contrasts sharply with who he's supposed to be. His attitude is also more cavalier than later on, I suspect because Sayers was trying to emphasize that he's the younger son of his noble family, and therefore a bit more carefree - perhaps deliberately so.

The mystery itself is rather clever: A naked middle-aged man with a peculiar set of pince-nez on his nose is found dead in the bathtub of an inoffensive gentleman's flat in London. No one knows who it is or how it got there, and although it's at first connected with the disappearance of a wealthy man elsewhere in the city, it's clearly not him. So who is it? What happened to him? Through a stroke of luck which is effectively what sets off the whole story, Wimsey is put in the perfect position from which to solve the crime, although he goes through some personal difficulties in doing so.

People have said that this isn't much of a mystery since the killer's identity is evident early on. I'm not sure how early on they mean, since I was about two-thirds of the way through the book before I'd figured it out (though I had suspicions a little earlier), which I suspect is when Sayers intended it be revealed, the remainder of the book being more concerned with how and why than with who. And, basically, it's just not a very long book.

This is a much more accessible book than, say, Gaudy Night. I think CJ was right to suggest I start reading the series in order.

Here's a new cat pic: Jefferson on a blanket I set under during cold months to read on my couch. I've just been leaving it in a heap at one end of the couch lately - trying to loosen up my tendency to keep everything neat and tidy a bit - and the cats love it.