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The limbo after the war, the propeller winding down dissolves to a ticking clock. "Well, the old guerre is finie," sighs the Yank pilot (Richard Barthelmess), "get tight" is the advice of his comrade (David Manners). "And then what?" "Stay tight." Cowboy (Johnny Mack Brown) and sharpshooter (Elliott Nugent) join them for an extended Paris revel, "spent bullets" one and all. The unofficial member of the squadron is the madcap heiress (Helen Chandler), introduced gravelly guarding a tuxedoed brawler's dentures in her champagne glass. "I saw her first." "It makes no difference, she belongs to us all now." The mix of impudence and melancholia known as "the Lost Generation," a self-imposed stasis with endless cocktails and private jokes and the secret yearning for oblivion. (Eliot is closer than Fitzgerald, "as he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool.") The sense of suspended interludes suits William Dieterle's first American movie, with its early-sound blurs of stiffness and vibrancy and giddiness and poignancy. "As brittle as a breadstick," the flyboy matched with the rich oddball with turtles in her bathtub, "laugh and play" is their desperate byword. Stopover in Père Lachaise Cemetery for the graves of Abelard and Heloise, one takes it too seriously or not seriously enough. Anxious tics behind dark specs, burned hands struggling to raise a toast, real bullets at the carnival gallery. "A Portuguese bullfight" and a dogfight spiral remembered in the back of a cab, suddenly there's only one of the survivors left and with no place to go but back into the world. "Why do you always have to be funny at the wrong time?" Truffaut (Jules et Jim) and Cassavetes (Husbands) absorb it gladly. With Walter Byron, George Irving, Herbert Bunston, and Luis Alberni. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |