Say a prayer for the dead already / and salute those next to die!" -- Lucy Westerna, reciting an old airman's drinking song for Count Dracula's bemusement (DRACULA, 1931)
A bad trip can leave you traumatized for weeks, cut off from a general populace who cannot see beyond their collective fog of assured continuity to understand why you're so pallid. The blinders that obscure the constant threat of death are, for you, if not outright removed, perforated to let in the rays of the black void. For those around you it's business as usual, the glazed-eyed consumers on their endless rotation from cubicle to couch to bed, while you sit outside it all, clawing softly at the fleshy disguise you call a face. A feeling of lost futility overwhelms your every thought and gesture, but lo! THE DAWN PATROL is waiting; the doomed airmen waiting their time to die up in the air over the trenches between France and Germany in what they thought was the war to end all wars, they understand your existential anguish! Are they not, in their way, the living dead? Look at the way the pilot up top resembles a corpse right out of a
Joe Kubert WEIRD WAR TALES cover. You can feel both the beating of post-war modernism's horrified, hideous heart and smell the dread of the next war, already in progress, which America was eyeing with the remorse of a redacted father who just got home from the front and now has to turn around and find his gun again...
Though directed by "ladies' choice" Edmund Goulding (GRAND HOTEL, DARK VICTORY), DAWN PATROL is a remake of an early sound Howard Hawks film, largely unseen and allegedly stilted. I've no qualm with this version as Goulding is just fine at capturing his own version of the Hawks' camaraderie. Like Hawks he keeps shots at a medium level to allow us to feel part of the action, part of the brotherhood of airmen, who treat their captured German pilots with respect, giving them drinks and food before the MPs take them away for questioning and internment. And of course our airmen agonize over all the fresh young recruits, most of whom are shot down during their first few soirees. What's most important in a film like this, since it's almost all male actors in a room talking, is that the actors be first rate and nothing beats seeing Basil Rathbone as the C.O., bravely taking the heat from righteous pilot Errol Flynn and drunken wingman David Niven. Not to spoil it, but there's a whole great middle segment with.... well, i can't spoil it.
But drinking, man is there a lot of well-deserved drinking, and after a bad trip, honey, if you don't have a drink or something to put your lights out, you're going to be hallucinating ghost anima fingers ripping your soul apart all night. But you
do have drinks, and they're apparently free, since the bar is your HQ. Goulding's DAWN PATROL puts you in that same pleasant zone, that land where you too belong to something cooler than yourself and the bartender is a personal friend, that Hawks puts you into via ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, AIR FORCE, RIO BRAVO, etc., and maybe even outdoes them as far as sheer existential chutzpah and melancholy.
The big existential question isn't ultimately how or why, but when? Eckhart Tolle (or was it Ram Dass?) writes of working with death row inmates and how they would have big breakthroughs, with the convicts turning to the glory of the eternal now. But then, if, say, the convict got off the short list and were put back on non-your-time-is-nigh status, they'd get cocky and forget the now, become hungry-mouthed ghosts again. Hawks and Hemingway understood it: they knew they had to be cozied up to death to write worth a damn. Like it or not, having survived the horrors of a bad acip trip, you're now in that same league as Hemingway and Hawks. And knocking back a few with THE DAWN PATROL can be like stowing away on a boat only to learn you've got a pre-paid royal suite with a fully-stocked bar. Every Icarus needs his wings melted before he can be of any mythic use, you just don't get to find that out until your wings burn, and you know Marlene's not to blame. THE DAWN PATROL is your welcome to brotherhood of the melted wings! Now get up in those deadly skies! Von Richtofen's gonna make you squeal like a pig.
A bad trip can leave you traumatized for weeks, cut off from a general populace who cannot see beyond their collective fog of assured continuity to understand why you're so pallid. The blinders that obscure the constant threat of death are, for you, if not outright removed, perforated to let in the rays of the black void. For those around you it's business as usual, the glazed-eyed consumers on their endless rotation from cubicle to couch to bed, while you sit outside it all, clawing softly at the fleshy disguise you call a face. A feeling of lost futility overwhelms your every thought and gesture, but lo! THE DAWN PATROL is waiting; the doomed airmen waiting their time to die up in the air over the trenches between France and Germany in what they thought was the war to end all wars, they understand your existential anguish! Are they not, in their way, the living dead? Look at the way the pilot up top resembles a corpse right out of a Joe Kubert WEIRD WAR TALES cover. You can feel both the beating of post-war modernism's horrified, hideous heart and smell the dread of the next war, already in progress, which America was eyeing with the remorse of a redacted father who just got home from the front and now has to turn around and find his gun again... 
Though directed by "ladies' choice" Edmund Goulding (GRAND HOTEL, DARK VICTORY), DAWN PATROL is a remake of an early sound Howard Hawks film, largely unseen and allegedly stilted. I've no qualm with this version as Goulding is just fine at capturing his own version of the Hawks' camaraderie. Like Hawks he keeps shots at a medium level to allow us to feel part of the action, part of the brotherhood of airmen, who treat their captured German pilots with respect, giving them drinks and food before the MPs take them away for questioning and internment. And of course our airmen agonize over all the fresh young recruits, most of whom are shot down during their first few soirees. What's most important in a film like this, since it's almost all male actors in a room talking, is that the actors be first rate and nothing beats seeing Basil Rathbone as the C.O., bravely taking the heat from righteous pilot Errol Flynn and drunken wingman David Niven. Not to spoil it, but there's a whole great middle segment with.... well, i can't spoil it. 
But drinking, man is there a lot of well-deserved drinking, and after a bad trip, honey, if you don't have a drink or something to put your lights out, you're going to be hallucinating ghost anima fingers ripping your soul apart all night. But you do have drinks, and they're apparently free, since the bar is your HQ. Goulding's DAWN PATROL puts you in that same pleasant zone, that land where you too belong to something cooler than yourself and the bartender is a personal friend, that Hawks puts you into via ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, AIR FORCE, RIO BRAVO, etc., and maybe even outdoes them as far as sheer existential chutzpah and melancholy.
The big existential question isn't ultimately how or why, but when? Eckhart Tolle (or was it Ram Dass?) writes of working with death row inmates and how they would have big breakthroughs, with the convicts turning to the glory of the eternal now. But then, if, say, the convict got off the short list and were put back on non-your-time-is-nigh status, they'd get cocky and forget the now, become hungry-mouthed ghosts again. Hawks and Hemingway understood it: they knew they had to be cozied up to death to write worth a damn. Like it or not, having survived the horrors of a bad acip trip, you're now in that same league as Hemingway and Hawks. And knocking back a few with THE DAWN PATROL can be like stowing away on a boat only to learn you've got a pre-paid royal suite with a fully-stocked bar. Every Icarus needs his wings melted before he can be of any mythic use, you just don't get to find that out until your wings burn, and you know Marlene's not to blame. THE DAWN PATROL is your welcome to brotherhood of the melted wings! Now get up in those deadly skies! Von Richtofen's gonna make you squeal like a pig.
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