Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

I don't have anything to add to the long-running critical discussion for Notorious, one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved pictures, and one of the most thoroughly unpacked in narrative, thematic, and technical terms. But rewatching the film on its new Blu-Ray edition, I was struck by the film's subtlety, a word rarely thrown around when discussing Hitchcock, even by his admirers. Still, there's a delicateness to Notorious not normally seen in the master's work, visible not only in the nuanced performances submitted by the cast but also in the director's camerawork. Even the celebrated key scene, one of the definitive Hitchcock shots, is so playful and light that the tension it generates is even more effective because of its unexpectedness.

The plot itself is, like so many Hitchcock thrillers, at once needlessly convoluted and forcibly direct: Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the disgraced but blameless daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by the American government to help expose her father's cohorts hiding in Brazil. But the nature of her assignment casts a dark shadow over the proceedings from the start, adding shades of moral complexity that threaten to makes the Americans look as perverse and inhuman as the Nazis themselves. Further complicating this moral and political ambiguity is its primary framing around a romantic story, personifying each side prodding Alicia with a single, lustful man, both of whom, in separate but linked ways, nearly kill her with their love.

Hitchcock, known for his ice-queen roles for actresses, gives an inherent sympathy to Alicia from the start. Opening, after a hilariously, uselessly specific title card (complete with date and time), at her father's sentencing, Notorious instantly places the woman under such scrutiny that it's impossible not to feel sorry for her. Hitch's camera might as well be one of the reporter's shoved up in her face as newsmen launch a barrage of questions that she quickly escapes. Without knowing anything about the nature of the trial, the sudden, harsh focus on a disheveled Bergman is unseemly, and Hitch knows it.

This feeling of unease and seedy surveillance carries over into the next scene, a drink-to-forget party where Alicia boozes it up with pals. But there's a man with his back to the camera sitting in the foreground, looming over everything even when Alicia is standing in front him talking to another guest. The shadowy outline grows when the camera pushes in closer as all the guests seat themselves at roughly the same height, making this figure even more sinister and imposing. The camera finally pivots around to reveal Cary Grant, playing American agent T.R. Devlin. This is a hell of a way to introduce the ostensible hero of the story, and Grant wastes no time making his character every bit as vile as his visual introduction suggests. His clipped accent, which elsewhere made his comic timing all the funnier, makes his speech cold and cruel. When he finally strikes up a conversation with the well-intoxicated Alicia, his curtness is further emphasized against her light, slurred whispers.

This wasn't Grant's first time undermining his image for the director. His role in Suspicion was so dark that the studio mandated a softer ending. But his performance here is almost worse; at least in Suspicion, Grant essentially plays the villain. Here, he's a loyal American seeking to rout some Nazis who escaped justice, so why does he give off such an eerie vibe? He gets Alicia out of a drunk driving arrest by flashing an unseen badge like a threat, and when Alicia comes to in a hangover, Hitchcock uses a woozy POV shot craning up and back to follow Devlin menacingly approaching her. Devlin even plays on Alicia's patriotism to force her into joining him, playing her tapes of her bugged house that prove her devotion to her country over her family. But somehow Grant turns even this into something twisted, making her exoneration inexplicably feel like blackmail.

Grant and Bergman, so in control of their body language, communicate gulfs of conflicting emotions in these early scenes and beyond. Bergman's smile is weary and sad even at its most plastered, while Grant hides contempt and longing in equal measure behind his stoic gaze. He's so good at selectively revealing and suppressing these moods that it's as easy to buy Devlin's subsequent falling for Alicia as it is to instantly see him as a villain. Without the actors' fluid shifts in body acting and chemistry, in fact, the film falls apart almost instantly. The script moves too quickly and arbitrarily from this seedy introduction of Devlin and Alicia to the love that suddenly blossoms between them in Rio. Admittedly, they only seem to enter into a relationship to make the subsequent plot development emotionally affecting, but if sparks of mutual disgust and passion didn't fly between the leads, that twist wouldn't work.

But, they do, and it does. Hitchcock applies the same delicacy to the revelation of the mission, a grim shock to Devlin as much as Alicia, as he does for the couple's dawning romance. Devlin, unaware how he and Alicia will infiltrate the Nazi ring in Rio, is called in by his superiors and told what Alicia is meant to do in ambiguously unambiguous terms. Alicia knows one of the spies, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), and the agents want her to play on his love for her. Devlin's bosses lingually circle around Alicia's wild past, obviously unable to come right out and call her a whore because of Production Code limitations. The elision makes the revelation that much worse, making it obvious what these men want of Alicia but not outright stating it. Likewise, the horrible understanding that dawns on Grant's face, and the equally roundabout way he tries to gently dissuade this course of action to no avail, is made heartbreaking for his inability to come right out and refuse. But that infuriating group of people who like to maintain that the Hays Code somehow made movies better by forcing them to be clever should take note of how Hitchcock deftly links Devlin's superiors with the censors who make their speech so euphemistic, or at least the moral character of such people. Devlin's repugnant behavior toward Alicia can be explained on a personal level, his desire for her so strong that he initially (and later) engages in regular shaming of her to bury his feelings. But his bosses have no real connection to Alicia, no knowledge of her other than what they compiled into a portfolio, yet they still pass judgment. Their callous remarks lack the bite with which Grant infuses his own, but their clinical remove in dictating this woman be a whore because they think she is one is, in a way, worse than Devlin's grotesque exhibition of affection.

The rest of the film plays out mostly through facial expressions that convey suffocating air of personal betrayal. This can first be seen, obviously, in the next scene, where Devlin must explain to Alicia what it is she's meant to do for her country. The entire exchange is a masterclass of acting, Grant's verbal eggshell-walking utterly needless as Bergman's face flashes with understanding and pain the second Devlin asks if she remembers a fella named Sebastian. The couple then fragments as each looks to the other for a way out of this situation. Alicia asks Devlin if he stood up for her, and the briefest flicker of doubt and pain crosses Devlin's face as he sees an opening and then closes it out of duty. He will only say that the choice is hers. Alicia knows that it isn't, but Devlin needs her to agree so that he can hate her for her "decision" and bury his feelings again. Two people ruin their lives in a quest for self-absolution, and a perverse form of patriotism corrodes both of them. Hitchcock doesn't want for troubling scenes in his canon, but this one has always disturbed me most. It inverts the teasing sexual energy of their previous scene together, the famous Code-skirting kiss, the tantalizing back-and-forth of love played in reverse as the couple rends itself apart.

Even when the film finally gets down to its thriller side, the suspense operates less on the Nazis' scheme of smuggling uranium (an almost laughably undercooked MacGuffin) than it does upon the gnarled love triangle between Devlin, Alicia, and Alex. Rains' casting, one last imposition on the director by David O. Selznick, was a masterstroke. Though significantly older than his co-leads, Rains' Alex projects a youthfulness and vigor at odds with the aged-beyond-their-years weariness of Alicia and Devlin. Where Grant hides Devlin's desires under hostile remove, Rains displays Alex's longing upfront. When Alex sits down with Alicia after an orchestrated reunion, he bluntly speaks of "the old hunger" returning, and Rains' face is soft with affection. As creepy as his forthrightness is, it's also refreshing compared to Grant's frosty condemnation, and Alex immediately establishes himself as more sympathetic than Devlin.

Complicating Alex are two factors. First is his extreme (albeit ironically perceptive) jealousy, which leads him to quickly suspect Devlin and generates much of the film's tension. As Alicia and Devlin uncover more information about the Nazi circle to which he belongs, Alex carefully watches his lover and grills her over every encounter she has with the handsome American. The "key" scene, in which Alicia smuggles the key to Alex's mysteriously locked wine cellar to Devlin, is tense as much for the fear Alex will discover his new wife doesn't love him as it is he will discover she is an American agent.

The second factor working on Alex is his mother. Leopoldine Konstantin, a veteran German actress, plays Madame Sebastian with more calculating venom than any other Hitchcock mother. She combines the emotional honesty of her son with Devlin's superiority and disgust, unreservedly making her disapproval of Alicia clear from the start. An insight into what Norma Bates might have been in life, Alex's mother mocks her son for falling in love, and his response that she just doesn't want him to love anyone but her emerges weak and docile, as if he could not stop the thought from spilling out of his head and stepped outside himself in a moment of stunned terror as he said the words. And when Alex eventually discovers Alicia's ruse and rushes to tell his mother, Konstantin receives his vague mention of something being wrong with Alicia with a joy she does not bother to disguise. And this is just when she thinks the woman is cheating on her boy; upon hearing the whole truth, she instantly hatches a plan to deal with this problem without alerting her son's zero-tolerance colleagues to his foolishness. "We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time," she says, the closest thing she has to consolation for her child's shattered heart.

The final stretch compounds the layers of irony already at work on the film, with the audience learning of the plan to poison Alicia before she meets Devlin and receives her harshest tongue-lashing yet as he mistakes her sickness for a hangover and gloats over her falling off the wagon. Then, a worried outburst from both Alex and his mother when one of the other Nazis accidentally reaches for her coffee cup alerts Alicia to the truth of her illness as Devlin still mulls over the "drunken" sight of her at their last meeting. When he finally puts two and two together and moves to rescue her, the couple share a beautiful scene in which they finally speak to each other plainly about their feelings, placing the emotional content of the film on equal narrative footing to the thriller plot, which concludes right after with that chilling walk down the staircase as the Nazis silently, menacingly assemble in a manner not unlike the end of The Birds.

Compared to the technical and psychological grandiosity of so much of Hitchcock's greatest work, Notorious is almost a whisper. Indeed, this is a film where emotional outbursts are what seal people's fate, whether it be the German metallurgist exclaiming over a uranium-filled bottle accidentally brought upstairs or Alex begging as Devlin speeds away with Alicia. Hitchcock's direction is no less technically impressive, nor as deftly manipulative, as his other work, but he makes the rare concession to his dream cast by letting them convey what is happening as much as his insert shots and emphasizing zooms. Notorious is, therefore, at once one of the director's lightest and darkest works, quiet in its delivery but thunderous in its implications.

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This post was written for inclusion in the For the Love of Film Blogathon, which is raising money to restore Graham Cutt's The White Shadow, a film written and assistant-directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Yes, that Hitchcock. It is more than a worthy cause and I can only encourage you to donate by clicking on the image below:

Capsule Reviews: Head, His Girl Friday, Elite Squad

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

If you ever wanted to know what A Hard Day's Night might have resembled had Richard Lester teamed up with the Beatles post-Revolver, Head is the film for you. The Monkees, sick of their (not inaccurate) image as a gimmick, attack the issue directly, presenting a plotless skewering of their own image and the various capitalist forces that shaped them. The stream-of-consciousness, self-reflexive movie runs through genres that reinforce cheap ideals (Westerns, war films, '50s Americana), all of it filled with product placement—there's even a Coca-Cola machine in the middle of the desert. Cut with acid-tinged whimsy, Head is nevertheless as much a critique of the late '60s as it is a gonzo embodiment of its creative possibilities. Rafelson uses rapid, overlapping images and false-color to create psychedelic effects, and in the chaos are pointed attacks on the Vietnam War, police brutality and various other topics of the day. Not a lick of this movie makes sense, but it's still one of the best rock movies I've ever seen. Grade: A

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Even faster than Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday doesn't reach the same heights but nevertheless displays Cary Grant at his comic best as a paper editor who speaks like a comic strip and wants nothing more than to undermine his ex-wife's planned second marriage. Rosalind Russell is no less fantastic as the woman who wants everything Walter represents but can't stand to be around him; the speed with which she falls into journalist mode undermines any pretense she has for leaving her old life. Hawks' gift for well-composed but unfussy compositions makes for perfectly staged but hands-off scenes that cede total control to the actors. Everything goes absolutely batty in the last act, but my favorite moment will always be the total aside of the mayor's dealings with a messenger from the governor, a ludicrous verbal run-around that hinges beautifully on the vaudeville chops of Billy Gilbert. Admittedly, the gags don't feel as timeless and physically huge as those of Baby or Twentieth Century, but comedy isn't about timelessness but moment-to-moment pleasures, and few films contain as many of those as His Girl Friday. Its last half hour is simply aces. Grade: A-

Elite Squad (José Padilha, 2007)

An artless piece of trash that stylistically rips off City of God and glorifies police brutality to boot, Elite Squad is so bad it's actually saved from outright offensiveness by how poorly constructed it is. Just as it nears the tipping point of fascism as cops viciously clear out Rio's crime-ridden favelas, the film gets sidetracked into a lengthy aside that makes light of police corruption after already showing some of its dark side. Take a page from GoodFellas: go from light to dark, not the other way around. But don't worry, soon it gets back to tearing apart the slums to prove that civil rights are impeding cops from doing the right thing and bashing in brains. The use of handheld cameras is some of the worst I've ever seen, so disoriented that even when a shot holds you can't make out anything. In some ways, that's a blessing. Grade: D

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

One of the chief reasons Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby is the king of the screwball comedies because it never stops. It has a straight man in Cary Grant's hysterically put-upon paleontologist, but no one in the movie is at all normal. Hawks himself later criticized this after the film proved, amazingly, to be a complete flop, saying he should have had at least one person acknowledge the lunacy and provide some kind of sanity anchor. But that's what makes the movie so great: it never steps outside itself to note how ridiculous (and downright naughty) everything is.

Some of the first lines of the film are pure innuendo, showing Grant's David Huxley, framed in an unflattering, goofy Thinker pose trying to figure out where a brontosaurus bone goes and telling his fiancé "I think this one must belong in the tail." "Nonsense," she says, "you tried it in the tail yesterday." This sets the ball rolling on a flagrantly sexual movie that inverts gender roles, making Grant the creepily stalked object of affection of Katharine Hepburn, who flashes into the movie like a firecracker and only gets more spectacular from there. While David is out playing golf to woo a potential museum investor, Hepburn's Susan walks up and plays his ball. Then, she drives off in his car, dragging him along on the running boards. Take a deep breath, this is as calm as the film gets.

Grant had already established his comic persona that would serve him well for the remainder of his career, but he still plays entirely against type here. He's so good at being clumsy, using his acrobatic talents for the first time in film in service to magnificent pratfalls, that it's easy to forget that this is Cary Grant, sexiest man who ever lived and a powerhouse leading man. He submits entirely to Hepburn, who has never seemed more masculine despite the absence of her usual suits. Hepburn is the aggressor, sizing up the bumbling paleontologist and seeing that beneath his obscuring spectacles and stick-up-his-ass gait, he is indeed Cary Grant. Naturally, she'd like a piece of that, so she begins contriving wilder and wilder reasons to keep David from his wedding to the frigidly, ironically named Miss Swallow (who almost certainly has no idea what her surname references and would be appalled if she did).

The titular Baby of the film is not, as one might have guessed, a human child but a tame leopard Susan's brother sent back from Brazil for their aunt, the same patron considering the donation to David's museum. Before long, the whole world's gone mad, with David and Susan chasing around their leopard; another, far less agreeable one they let out of a zoo truck under the impression it's Baby; and George, Aunt Elizabeth's dog, who steals the brontosaurus bone David has with him and buries it. All the while, Susan's antics attract attention and her lies grow more and more fanciful.

Hepburn and Grant had already co-starred in two films, the even more gender-bending Sylvia Scarlett and the commercially disappointing but critically lauded Holiday, and they had another coming in 1940's The Philadelphia Story. Their familiarity each other makes for intense chemistry, even as both convince the audience they've never met before in this movie. By the same token, Hawks incorporates enough self-reflexivity—Susan using Grant's character name from The Awful Truth to identify him in an elaborate lie to the cops, the use of the star dog Asta for George—that the look of knowing on Susan's face from the moment she sets eyes on David suggests she has some of her actor's awareness. As fast as the film moves, the actors needed that past working relationship to let them feel so believably attracted. It's difficult to describe how the movie builds their romance even as it never flags, something the film itself points out when David says, "It isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven't been any quiet moments."

Not quite as fast-paced as Hawks' own His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby nevertheless feels the most breakneck of the screwballs even as it is also one of the most carefully composed. Obviously, it takes skill to move at this speed, but that wouldn't automatically make it good: think of all those showboating heavy metal guitarists who wow everyone by playing arpeggios over, and over, and over. Like, yeah, great, you can do scales, now when are you gonna be a big boy and write something? Bringing Up Baby doesn't simply assume that by pushing forward it is funny. It relies on a perfect cast of loony characters* to complement Grant and Hepburn, who crucially play their roles with conviction. Hepburn purportedly did not realize the importance of this at first, overselling her lines because she was in a comedy, but Grant, by then a close friend, set her straight**. If Bringing Up Baby is a film where no one is a reasonable, sensible human being, it is also one where everyone in it likes to think himself reasonable and sensible. That, fundamentally, is why it remains one of the most enduringly funny comedies more than 70 years after its release.

*My favorite side player is Walter Catlett's Constable Slocum, a bumbling sheriff so forgetful he finds himself in pleasant chats with those he seeks to arrest, only to snap back to reality and explode in rage at having been "duped" into treating the perps with pleasantries.
**For a far more thorough account of Hepburn's on-set evolution, read this piece by Sheila O'Malley.

Only Angels Have Wings

The rousing, boisterous opening of Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings is misleading in its jubilation, the shots of a bustling Latin harbor giving the impression of adventures to come. But the music fades out, and the peppy opening proves merely to be the setup to a decrescendo that lasts the rest of the film. With its romantic title and setting among pilots in hazardous terrain, Only Angels Have Wings seems the film that should be a classic melodrama. Instead, it communicates a deep, affecting melancholy, and also a keen sense of gallows humor that parlays the screwball credentials of its stars into something with more kick.

Off the boat sailing into the Andes port town of Barranca strides Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a piano-playing chanteuse, so confidently and forcefully that a fresh sailor winds up with a face looking as if a puma swatted it (hilariously, he acts like a cowed spouse, blaming his swollen and scratched eye on falling into a doorknob). Two American airmen, gobsmacked by the sight of this blond beauty in the middle of the teeming harbor, nearly fall over themselves trying to win her attention. She prepares to box them as well, until she recognizes their accents and joyously tags along with them, thrilled "to hear someone talking in something that doesn't sound like Pig Latin." They take her back to their home base -- a building that combines elements of a general store, bar/restaurant and air delivery service -- where they attempt to ply her with American luxuries such as steak. The place is run by Dutchy (Sig Ruman), named for his national origin, and his presence creates a marvelously Hawksian microcosm where different ethnicities casually rub against each other without comment, save for Bonnie's initial spat of racism, but then she is cast as the outsider even among the Americans.

The two men behave as if college lads on vacation, forgetting all their duties and sporting over the woman right in front of her. With Dutchy chuckling good-naturedly in the background as his employees cost him time and money, the atmosphere shifts fully from the confusing bustle of the harbor to a lively but homely setting, a place where all the various people populating this port town can meld into one friendly group. Fueled by a steady supply of machismo, Dutchy's store looks to be one of the most appealing groups of Hawksian individuals in the director's canon.

Then reality finally seeps into the picture: at last, the men can put off their jobs no longer and one of the two, Joe, heads out to fly a mission in the dense fog around Barranca, and on his return he crashes and dies. Suddenly, the carefree nature of the film turns deadly serious, and it never particularly lets up again. The word "Hawksian" exists because the director centered so many of his movies on the same topic: men walking the line between individualism and teamwork to overcome obstacles. Here, however, the only obstacle is death, and it is insurmountable. No matter how high those planes climb, they won't be able to stay up forever, and eventually they'll crash down into death's infinite maw. These men band together, sure, but only in mutual emotional support. They do not have a luxury of a villain: they struggle against inevitability.

Ingeniously, Hawks decides to rest the split between the lighter tone of the beginning and the more macabre feel of the rest of the film entirely on the shoulders of Cary Grant. For my money, Grant's entrance into the film eclipses even that of the most famous of appearances in 1939, that of John Wayne in Stagecoach. Where Ford's film made its impression by literalizing Wayne's magnetism by sending the camera so quickly at the star that it seems to have broken free of operator control, Grant's entrance here relies on his singular ability to stand back just far enough to let the wave of talent emanating from him crest and crash onto the camera.

Grant simply appears in a door frame as the two other pilots fail to contain their drooling over Bonnie, sporting a cowboy hat and gaucho as if he looked at the leather jacket and sunglasses of the stereotypical pilot and thought, "Too subtle." Where everyone else bustles around the place in Dionysian revelry, Grant's Geoff Carter gently saunters in from his mission, laconic even in body language. Things quiet down when he arrives, not because he intimidates anyone but because they want to see what he'll do.

The remove in Geoff's carriage becomes evident when Joe dies, his steeled emotions a defense against the constant risk of losing a friend. The others fall in line too, responding to Bonnie's anguish over the man's death with feigned ignorance, everyone acting as if Joe never existed now that he no longer does. Only a quiet gesture Geoff makes in private with Dutchy reveals just how badly he feels every time someone in his command crashes. But he cannot display that outside the room, and his emotional distance extends to Bonnie, who is incensed outwardly that Geoff is boorish to her and, inwardly, because he man be the first man in many years to ignore her.

Grant brilliantly plays Geoff in the manner that made him the most irresistible leading man of all time. I never could play hard to get. I was always too invested in the outcome, too reliant on that need for reciprocity. Most people strike me as being bad at playing the game, only ever succeeding when they genuinely do dislike the person pining for their affections, or are at least uninterested. At best, they're just scared of commitment and decide to waste time with a game they are never good at. But Cary Grant, to steal from Richard Schickel, never played hard to get. He was hard to get. He could stand in the corner seemingly oblivious to the existence of everyone but himself, at last leaning out of his solipsistic bubble to kiss the woman near desperation for longing for him. There are endless fantasies of the suffering man entreating his ideal love until she finally relents, but Cary Grant did his bit made up for the massive gap, letting potential loves come to him, never making the trip himself. Bonnie cannot wait to leave this flea-ridden cesspool, but Grant's presence allures her so much she eventually cancels her ride home to keep seeing him. Wouldn't you?

It is easy to lose sight of the entire film's copious rewards for the looming redwood that is Grant. It's difficult to even call him anything but his full name, as if to use Grant alone is akin to using Excalibur without its scabbard, a mistake that cost Arthur his life. The more I see of him the more I find myself unable to call him anything less than the greatest film actor who ever lived, and Only Angels Have Wings boasts a performance that cements itself among the ever-changing list of favorite Cary Grant roles. His Geoff retains some of the comic timing that made Grant famous, but even his interplay with Arthur, another screwball icon, is tinged with melancholy.

Where Grant always gave enough space to make love interests come to him, here the reasons for doing so are sadder, more vulnerable. Not only does Geoff have to consider the danger of his job, he must also take into account how that danger would affect Bonnie. His first wife left him because the stress of worrying about him made the constant threat of his death more difficult to bear than death itself, preferring Geoff to crash and die simply to let of her the damn seesaw. Bonnie, naturally, falls for Geoff, but this time he won't allow his feelings to intervene and break his terrible shield.

That same dour tone on romantic love extends to the platonic realm of the male interactions. Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's best friend, has grown old, his failing eyesight forcing a reluctant Geoff to ground the man to save his life. But what is life for a man who can no longer fly, who must return to the mortals after soaring above them for a lifetime? Kid's sadness turns to anger when a disgraced pilot, Bat (Richard Barthelmess), returns to the base. Bat bailed on a falling aircraft, trapping the engineer, Kid's brother, as the plane plummeted. Compounding the hostility of the men toward a traitor is the fact that Bat shows up with Geoff's ex-wife (played by Rita Hayworth, which can only deepen the sting). But even that level of ire cannot last, and a heroic act by Bat absolves him of his earlier sin, an act presented just as stoically as the more dire material.

That's the damnedest thing about the movie: it never lays off the gloom, even when it appears to lapse back into melodrama. Bat's triumph of platonic commitment reflects Geoff and Bonnie's budding romantic relationship, but both cannot lift the pall covering the film. Hawks maintains the fog around Dutchy's service, as if it were not merely condensing moisture but the ever-billowing smoke from the plane crashes around the perilous area, that mist reminding everyone inside of what awaits him someday.

That quiet tone allows from some understated beauty, such as Bonnie displaying her first touch of interesting humanity when she fails to detect the sarcasm in Geoff's voice when he meets her and condescendingly asks if she thinks airplanes make her think of birds. "No, I didn't," she responds with breathless awe. "That's what makes it so wonderful. It's really just a flying human being." Even Grant nearly breaks and lets on his attraction in the moment. That touching moment is contrasted with the chilling quality of Joe's flat voice over the radio when he attempts to return and crashes, his monotone not letting the audience relax or anticipate the worst. Occasionally, the humor comes through, such as the wordplay of Bonnie asking Geoff if he still "carries the torch" for his ex-wife and he holds up a cigarette and asks "Got a match?" There's also the time Bonnie uses a literal act to mock Geoff's macho proclamations: "I thought you never got burned in the same place," she sneers, and Grant's snicker lightens up the screen as if it were always a comedy. But the somber tone is unlike practically anything I can recall seeing out of mainstream Hollywood fare at the time. Only Angels Have Wings stops short of the cynicism of film noir but goes quite a bit further than the lavish emoting of a melodrama.

That is because the two primary relationships of the film, between man and woman and man and other man, are superseded by the connection of man to death. Gloom is rampant in Only Angels Have Wings, but it also contains the perverse optimism that comes with fatalism: when one knows of the finality of death, one strives to make the days alive count all the more. When Grant finally opens up, the promise of his relationship with Bonnie manages to overcome the burden of grief around them, something that might not have been possible had the film not earned that small breakthrough. But in classic Grant fashion, he cannot up and confess love to the girl: in the film's last act of stoic passion, Geoff leaves the fate of his relationship up to a coin toss, only for Bonnie to discover he rigged the game as he flies one last mission for Dutchy.

"I'm hard to get, Geoff," Bonnie says to him before the climax. "All you have to do is ask me." Any other man would have been on his knees an hour of screentime earlier begging, not asking, but that's the power of Grant, and of this film. It never screams or moans or wails. It just trudges on in its sadness, making the twinkling of sorrow in Geoff's eyes at the end as devastating as a full breakdown. That Only Angels Have Wings can somehow end this strain of thought on a happy, life-affirming note threw me so completely that I shall return to this, possibly Hawks' greatest masterpiece, in the hopes of figuring out how the son of a bitch pulled it off.