Andes Hard: NIGHT FLIGHT

"Fog... darkness.... surrounds us like a prison," intones John Barrymore  to a row of aviation board trustee silhouettes, "but no more!" Above him glows a giant topological map of South America, like a comforting artsy lighthouse beacon. He's sending brave pilots like Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery over and through and around the Andes! Up and down the South American coast from Rio down to Buenos Aires, even with zero visibility in the dead of night without enough lift to make it above the troposphere! He's prepared for the inevitable crashes but not for a minute lateness or a single mechanical slip-up. The mail must go out on time! Or a pilot must lie dead, a plane lost. This is history! This is happening! "In spite of ya, night flying is going on!"

The trustees wince in fear -- Buenos Aires is fogged-in and the Andes are dangerous even in clear daylight due to treacherous wind currents  -- but with JB at the helm, flights leave on schedule even in ceiling zero! And the planes aren't all fancy like the poster above, they're bi-planes, and Andes' air currents hit them "like an elevator!" (there's some exhilarating aerial footage of Mongtomery's little plane bobbing up and down in the wind currents over endless white caps). Gazing contemptuously one last time in their piddling humanitarian direction, Barrymore snarls at the row:  "If it wasn't for me you'd still have one plane, a ferry service across the river to Montevideo." Yo, I took a three hour (?) hovercraft ferry across that river! And its entirety is (a natural) light coffee brown! When the water sprays up it turns the whole sky a surreal setting sun pink... I felt like I was on Venus or something. Instead, just the opposite end of the world.

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic and modern meditation, full of great cool midnight moments, particularly in the Robert Montgomery sections; he seems to really grasp that elusive mix of bravery and wistfulness the movie is going for. After nearly dying in the valley between two mountains, he lands at the BA airport with a kind of calm benevolence. More than almost any other actor in any other moment he underplays the cosmic relief of being safe on firm ground after so long hovering over the maw of death, while conveying to a level approaching poetry, or at least early Hemingway. Unfolding over one long night it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction--clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Just our luck if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting. Her endless sobs invite the same sort of passive sleepiness as the drone of the planes. "Like an elevator!"

Better moments: Robert Young's slow, careful dismounting from his plane after he nearly crashes deep in a canyon. Bumming a cigarette from the prop man and slyly kissing of the ground, Young tells him "air current... dropped me into a canyon... just missed the rocks. It's as if the mountains were crouching ready to spring at ya.... not a thing moved... almost too quiet.... as if a secret..." and he catches himself, pulling back from conjuring a silent demon incarnation of the Andes. Again the moment is leisurely, dreamy, Young makes vivid the high strangeness of what it feels like almost dying in the middle of nowhere without a creature stirring for hundreds of miles and how the landscape itself starts to seem like some giant, sentient ambivalent god (maybe if you've ever driven alone through an empty stretch of Montana or Wyoming while almost out of gas in the dead of night know too wanting to kiss the ground). "It's too good to be alive... on such a night." Young says, and his gratitude-drenched sardonic laugh feels real and beautiful. He even goes to dinner with Lionel Barrymore, an old codger who can't stop scratching his eczema and fining pilots for being even ten minutes late in the darkness, fog, and wind. But Young says he's "not half-bad" and you feel some joy because hey, life is precious when death is so daily courted and maybe that's why it makes such a dreamy, fascinating, hypnotic film. Meanwhile the wives and girlfriends pine at home, fretting every unreported hour. And Dr. Irving Pichel waits in Rio for the medicine to come by plane - which a child needs or he won't live the night!

But oh, there are some worried wives, the coolest of whom is Myrna Loy (of course) married to most uncool man (Gargan) and the most uncool (Hayes) inhabiting big ether-misted greenhouses of monologues, bugging Barrymore to bring her man home in one piece, as if he can somehow stop the weather or the night. Even if he could, Barrymore refuses to let sentiment get in his way. He doesn't even know that package of medicine waiting in a foggy Buenos Aires for the Rio-bound plane, but he does know only a ruthless iron determination can create the impossible dream, and that night flights are already going on in Europe and North America and we have to keep up! Up! UP!

Aside from the beautiful muted poeticism there's a giddily unabashed look towards death that reminds me of The Little Prince, which makes sense since that book too was written by aviator-poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry; you can tell its written by someone genuinely in love with the moon, the night, flying, the Andes and living on the lip of death. I like death too films that occur in the middle of the night--that say fuck you to normal sleep schedules--really soothe my ruffled brow, and I love that for some stretches there's no talking in Night Flight at all, just the tick-tock of clocks and metronomes, the whoosh of turbulence, and weird ethereal vocalizing in amidst the lullaby soundtrack, it's like my white noise machine in film form. Even the wives pining at home are helped by the deep dark spaces; their shadowy boudoirs are like big warm airy wombs. And as they all hover between life and death, love and loss, goodbyes and going back to sleep, a really dreamy, opiate sense of floating coheres.

While it's packed with MGM stars, ala Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, any sense of Night Flight being an ensemble film is undone by how seldom two stars share more than one scene. The pilots are off on their own, up in the clouds, bathed in darkness, fog, and moonlight; their wives are home alone, eating dinner and crying into their champagne; over at the Buenos Aires air station, Barrymores try to hold it all together while gazing up at the big board, lecturing abstract silhouettes, and fining sleepy pilots, as if each actor only imagines the others exists but in reality they're all asleep and the empty night sky is the dream canvas. At home, the silence and dark tendrils of sleep seem to creep around whining Helen Hayes and gorgeous Myrna Loy like loving arms of night. In the air the moon is the like a big comforting mother cradling the plane like a baby, and the BA tango music picked up on the radio is perfect in its ghostly lullaby allure.

Some of the comments around IMDB encapsulate what is wrong with the film as far as conventional drama, and they are all quite right, but for me personally these same 'flaws' are why the film's so cool and beguiling. Michael Elliot writes:

I think the biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't all that impressive and most of the drama never comes because the story never builds up any emotional connection to any of the people we meet. The Gable character is meant to be the backbone of the drama yet we never get to really meet him and we certainly never get to know him as all of his scenes are in the air and he's given very little dialogue.

But Michael, that's the point! These characters we meet in this period are all isolated, adrift in their little pocket of the world, sleeping in dark art deco rooms or crying in front of the nervous maid, waiting weeks for their husband to drift home for a few days where all he does is sleep and look wistfully out the window at that old devil moon. It's like the modern age is being born before our eyes and the sad faces of the old widows and brides as their men take off to sea in Moby Dick are here frozen at their fullest blossom in nightshade honey and spread across die dunkelbrot nacht. 

So thanks, TCM, for rescuing this film, and assisting in getting the licensing issues between Exupéry and MGM resolved, allowing it to emerge from its 75 years inside the dark cloud legal limbo like Amelia Earhart. We can almost feel the lack of eyes that have been laid on this, the way it feels is like a person comfortable with being a lonely artist, most awake and productive in the hours between midnight and dawn, when everyone else is asleep so they don't clog the airwaves with petty junk, and he can subliminally harness their dreamy calm. Many critics and fans who've wanted to see it for decades were perhaps expecting too much, I wasn't expecting anything except that it wouldn't measure up to the brilliance of another film about treacherous night flying over the Andes, Hawk's Only Angels Have Wings. And perhaps it's in the comparison, as the Fail Safe to Wings' Dr. Strangelove. In fact the two airlines could very well be connecting to each other along the South American flight plan! They might never meet, either, just a pilot once in awhile comes through Barranca, buys some drinks, waits til the storm clears, and takes off again.

And you can find much breadth of vision between the two if you compare the warm camaraderie of Hawk's film, which takes place almost entirely in the cozy bar/saloon/airfield owned by Sig Rumann, with the shadowy isolation of the command center of Night Flight, wherein the only 'fun; moment occurs when Young and Dorothy Burgess drunkenly sing "How Dry I Am" as they drive up to the runway in her convertible. It's a single moment of merriment like a daring final laugh in the face of mortality, vs., say, "The Peanut Vendor" in Angels, or the various macabre toasts, "Hurrah for the next who dies!" in The Lost Patrol (see my analysis of the WWI anti-war aviation films of the early 30s).  In this one, the song comes when the sun is just coming up, and Young puts his flight suit on over his tuxedo and gives his girl in the convertible a farewell kiss, and off he goes into the horizon, still drunk off his ass. Even in these early days of commercial cinema pilots went to work drunk! Why not? It's not like there are pedestrians or stop signs in the sky, and you're already taking your life in your hands just going up there. You need courage, by the quart if needed. And god knows you can't even be nice to Lionel Barrymore's inspector, lest brother John hear about it and break up the friendship with petty fines, so that it will be easier sending the boys into their death. What a dick.

But now that planes can fly fly fly up high enough to coast right over the Andes, thanks to pressurized cabins (and even heroes like Denzel get dragged over the coals for cockpit drunkenness) the opportunities for a man to sneer at mortality are far between. And the weird disconnect between all the stars' big scenes (like each actor was shot in a day or two on a soundstage where they didn't have to run into each other) is perfect for the subject matter. In careening through the inky blackness of the night sky instead of coasting through the inky dark dreams of sleep with their Argentine wives, these brave men of the air mail routes are, just like Exupéry's Little Prince, unbound up by the laws of gravity, sleep schedule convention, or the normal routines of human relationships. Refusing to choose life over death or home life over the air or vice versa, if they go down, they go like men, with only bobbing jellyfish parachutes for gravestones, free forever of their overbearing bourgeois wives.

Some more lines from Moby Dick maybe encapsulate the true kernel of poetic treasure within the seemingly disparate scenes of Night Flight:

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Like those birds on the plain, other MGM star-studded prestige pics like Dinner at Eight may soar critical esteem but they're in familiar ground, while Night Flight--even when it nosedives, is way up in its own gyre. Where conventional airplane dramas tend to just take a spin around the void, throw in some flares and then ride off back to safety, Night Flight plunges straight down into the black abyss, landing lights off, harpoons at the ready, all to get the postcards and insulin to Rio at the scheduled time. Call it crazy, call it suicide, but it's the kind of black art that stirs me up like Ahab's electric oratory. It's no surprise then that I'll defend the lonely black night beauty of this film, though it crushes me to the core like gravity's ticking metronome....

And, like flying itself, is often boring.

Amnesiac Cinema: THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) and SUCCUBUS (1968)

  "I would have preferred modernity. Here you move and everything squeaks."

The amnesiac occupies an understandably hallowed place in post-war European cinema, where endless language barriers, generation and gender gaps, entangled ancient and modern architecture, passport red tape, culture shock, changing politics (communist insurgencies etc) and class stratification work both for and against a sense of formed identity. In any European metropolis, if a woman wakes up and doesn't remember her own name or what she's supposed to be doing with her life she can still get by fairly easily. As long as she's not too old or young or unattractive, is reasonably cool, sexually casual, happens to be wearing decent clothes and doesn't have a tendency to panic when things get weird, she can spend whole European films comfortably navigating bedrooms and jobs without ever losing her uneasy sense of displacement, or we in the audience--or the character she meets--ever knowing she even has amnesia. Is she just a 'modern' woman? Do these people she's talking even really know her? Are we supposed to know? If we stand up in the theater and announce we're lost in the plot we're liable to be heckled as a petit-bourgeois square. It's the 'not knowing' that opens the way for the 'modernist' response so coveted by the art house cinemagoer. Once a Bazin-ist figures out the plot, he gets up and leaves.

And it's always a woman with this hidden amnesia. Guys would never hide it. They'd grab the whole movie by the lapels and demand it become a detective yarn, grabbing the first pretty girl they find and begging her to let them crash on their couch and be cared for like a broken winged bird. But women if they're hot, don't even need to grab the lapels or tell the guy the truth. What guy would really worry about getting to know her past? He'd just remake her into his mother, or a whore. Why bother finding out the difference? Thus girls are comfortable conveying a nowness, a lack of past we all want to believe is the same thing as 'spontaneity.'

So... I hate to ask, but is the main character in THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) trying to conceal that she doesn't know who she is or who anyone else is, or is she faking amnesia to avoid having to report possibly running over a child (she bumped her head as she ran over whatever she thinks she may have hit)? No one asks her anything specific as she navigates her way forward through her days; she's able to cruise through her Argentine town on auto-pilot. Everyone--servants, husband, landscapers, patients (she's a doctor)--preparing for her arrival and departure like no matter where she chooses to go she's been expected.
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Unless it comes with a big forwarding narration or establishing title crawl (i.e. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") or is a sequel, we begin all films as amnesiacs (unless we've seen the movie before), so an amnesiac heroine can just seem... modern. It's also modern for her to actively resist interpretation, or labeling (She's more than just your whore, Charles!); it's as if she wanders into each new scene as if from the movie across the multiplex, and no one dares tell her she's in the wrong place. She resists our using her words and expressions to establish her identity and relationship to those around her. She stays neutral or 'surprising' so as to not admit she doesn't know the correct response to each new challenge. A man keeps bothering her, touching her, and if she doesn't know if its her husband, a lover, a brother, or just a pesky stalker, rather than dare ask she might just start loudly calling for attention, jumping up on a cafe table and trying to get him to sing. She doesn't dare ask who she is, as that would leave her vulnerable to their interpretation.

Anyone coming out of a long night or life of blackout drinking knows just how she feels. Wake up next to someone you don't know once or twice, and you'll 'get' what I mean.  You don't want to ask their names as that confirms you don't know them; it might seem prudish to ask if you had sex, or naive to ask if you used a condom, or dumb to ask where your pants are. Better to just sneak out while they're asleep.

The drawback to being so free of class distinctions here in the U.S. is that you can't just walk up to random people and start conversations and expect them to answer you and judge by your clothes and manner that you can be trusted; nor identify and expect to be taken care of by, a distinct indentured class (like the Argentine native-'Indian' population). Who do you choose to ask for directions when you're lost? What economic/class group are you in and which class are you comfortable exploiting? Can we ever be sure the person who approaches us and seems friendly won't in the end be just some homeless bum asking for money, or a psycho glommer, or a charming serial killer? If they act like our lover, maybe, they think, we're amnesiac enough to believe they are.

In THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the (possible) amnesiac is Veronica (Maria Onetto), a dentist in a small Argentine town. Wherever she goes people know just who she is, or seem to, and someone seems to be cleaning up her past behind her as she goes. Her amnesia begins when she hits her head on the roof of her car after running over... something-- either a dog or a small boy -- she can't trust herself to remember, and as the film goes on, we don't know what her game is. What first looks like a cop digging up bodies on the side of the road turns out to be a plumber digging up a clogged pipe; the droning dissonance of pop songs on the radio seem halfway to being haunting ghost voices in her head, they almost seem to accuse her. In one of the greatest scenes she hides out in a bathroom in the hospital and it takes awhile for her, and us, to realize the nurses barging in and kicking in the stalls are not after her. The only thing we do know: director-writer Lucretia Martel is a friggin' genius.

It helps to understand socialism and the much more enlightened way that doctors and dentists don't automatically get to be rich in places with truly socialized medicine. Argentina's doctors still make house calls and their hospitals have the kind of rundown institutionalized look we usually associate only with public high schools and prisons in this country. Frankly this how it should be, and having been there twice with my ex-wife, once before once after the economic collapse, I can vouch for the casual, physically affectionate way people relate to each other, based almost purely on signifiers of either the young intellectual class, which included doctors and dentists, the noveau riche (which most Argentines refer to simply as "gangsters") and the very poor, the local Indian class who here in the complex mise en scene of THE HEADLESS WOMEN have a kind of mystic spiritual omnipresence.

When looking for comparisons one must go to Russia, a huge cultural influence on the hip socialism of Argentina. Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS covers similar ground but is a shrill Jerry Lewis face compared to the subtlety of Lucretia Martel, which is born of Chekhov. Argentina has a close relationship to Russia, to the point where many people are given Russian names (1), Russia is certainly a land of an illustrious but strange, violent past and the 'amnesia' of THE HEADLESS WOMAN recalls the mystery of Anastasia,  the black spots in Russia's history thanks to its various purges and Argentina's own 'Reign of Terror.'

To explain, I quote this passage from Suddenness May Happen's Adrian Bregazzi:

On 24th March 1976, a military junta under General Jorge Videla overthrew the Perón government in Argentina. On 19th May, Borges, Ernesto Sabato and other writers met with Videla, expressing their support for the overthrowing of the Perónista terrors, and for Videla's stating that "the development of culture is essential for the development of a Nation."

Between 1976 and 1983 an estimated 30,000 people were 'disappeared' by the Argentinian Dictatorship. On 15th December 1983, writer Sabato became president of the newly-formed National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, the government-established commission empowered to investigate the 'disappearance' of persons in Argentina over the previous 20 years.

In 2007, in his book “Cultural Amnesia”, (the now) Clive James published a personal diatribe against Borges, confiscating his years of creative work and judging him posthumously guilty of silence during the Dirty War of the Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983).

Not to get into the whole mess down there, as Martel's protagonist is so strange we're never quite sure if she even has amnesia. And I don't want to spoil the 'surprise' or lack thereof, let's just say that the openness of interpretation is key, because there are two ways to watch an amnesiac movie, and only one will give you pleasure, the other will make you feel 'left out'. If you assume the woman doesn't have amnesia, for example, the films listed here can seem distended, dull, unfocused, sort of like if you walk into an Antonioni film halfway through with a head full of sugar. If you bear in mind the amnesiac precept, you can get your mind kind of blown thinking about the world, language, cultural and gender barriers that separate us and make it relatively easy for a woman--or a country--to go through life with no sense of the past. And the best of both worlds is to have a protagonist who shares our foreign film culture shock in such a way as we never know which one of us really knows what's going on, and that's what ART is all about!


I first came to this conclusion watching SUCCUBUS (AKA NECRONOMICON), the 'Sensation of 67' a few years ago, who has a similarly amnesiac heroine, this one a nightclub performer who loses touch with reality and can't tell if she really is a sadistic killer or just plays one on stage:

Strange characters come up to her at the various soirees, seemingly thrilled to have found her at last, as if they've been looking and looking for Lorna since they last met. She merely stares at these interlopers blankly, not doubting what they say, but also not caring. In this context, the pick-up line, “Haven’t we met before?” takes on an extra creepy overtone. Anything that happened before the credits of the film--anything that we have not seen on-screen--does not exist for Lorna or for us. Thus relationships between Lorna and her lovers are always in flux. After her first performance, which is the first lengthy scene of the film, Lorna mysteriously appears at Mulligan’s (Jack Taylor) front door. He’s already in his bathrobe and when he answers, and seems to not remember who she is. As viewers, we can’t tell whether she’s just shown up uninvited like a stalker from the club or whether they in fact live together and are just playing a sexy game, or whether this is merely the result of language difficulties. Is he just hungover and doesn't trust his own memory? Is he used to inviting women to "come over later" and then forgetting who they even are? Or is he just, by default, unable to say no to a sure thing?




Whatever the real truth might be, the not-knowing works to both excite and disconcert. As the pair move playfully into the bedroom, we begin to think that maybe Lorna herself isn’t sure why she came there. Anyone who has ever tried to hide the fact that they don’t remember someone who knows them will relate. Is she taking advantage of his amnesia, or is he taking advantage of hers? Or is Franco's sporadically amateurish direction and the bad dubbing (2). In the cat and mouse game of who remembers what, it’s the being in the moment that counts, and Franco’s sense of the moment, and the erotic by extension, is very advanced—and perfectly suited to the world of jetsetting, booze-swilling, partner swapping glitterati of swingin’ ’67!

From there the film just keeps rolling back and forth through a haze of flashbacks, dreams and different countries. Lorna feels her way through events by the impulses coming from her unconscious, be they to seduce, kill or spout poetic monologues. She bears her amnesia close to the vest and in this way she is a perfect stand-in for the viewer, the "art film" viewer in particular, who may be forever wondering what's going on in the narrative themselves. We've all walked into the middle of a movie before, and had to instantly guess what was going on and who was what to who, people sshhh-ing us if we asked what was going on. So wither la Succubus? Is Franco a bad director with no vision, or is he a genius whose films improve on repeat viewings?” To paraphrase the stilted English dialog in the film: “What good would it do to freak out about amnesia when not knowing can be so pleasurable?”

(...) And of course, with the ancient architecture of Europe backing her up, Lorna’s amnesia stretches back far longer than her American counterparts: the amnesiacs in Memento and Mulholland Drive can only regress a little ways in their young, gaudy, pre-fab countrysides. Vertigo’s Carlotta Vance has to come from the pre-U.S., version of California, requiring long drives in Scottie’s car out to nationally preserved landmarks. Lorna’s European location allows for so much ancient architecture all around her that her amnesia can slide back through several centuries without much effort.





(More here: Time Travel for Amnesiacs: Succubus and the Moebius Love Strip)
 NOTES:
1. My Argentine ex-wife was given the Russian name Natacha, for example, and strangely enough, she looks a lot like the girl in the upper right of the top picture. 
2. Inevitably these 'international' productions are filmed MOS or with actors all speaking in their own languages, then for the dubbing the actors contribute to the language track of their native tongue, so Jack Taylor might contribute to the English track but not the French, while a French actress vice versa, etc.