Here is another Howard Hawks film starring Cary Grant and while you might expect this to be another romance in some exotic locale, it’s also actually a very serious film about what is now called the Golden Age of aviation. Hawks wrote this story himself after being impressed by some pilots that he has met in Mexico and so this film is set in some generic South American country. I’m not sure that the film is entirely realistic in portraying flying as being so dangerous but it certainly is full of tension and some of the flying shots are simply amazing given the technological limitations of the time.

Bonnie Lee who is travelling across South America on a ship makes a stopover on the port town of Barranca. There she befriends the group of Americans and Europeans who run the town’s small airline. Businessman Dutchy owns the airline together with the restaurant, bar and hotel but it is Geoff Carter who runs it. That night a pilot who had been flirting with Bonnie dies after a botched landing in the fog and she is shocked by the fatalistic attitude of Geoff and the other pilots. Nonetheless she feels strongly attracted to Geoff while he in turn is wary of being tied down with a woman who would insist on stopping him from flying. She decides to stay for a while just a new pilot Bat MacPherson arrives with his wife. It turns out that MacPherson is known to the other pilots and shunned for saving himself and letting his mechanic die in a crash some time ago. Meanwhile Geoff keeps having the pilots perform dangerous missions and he reveals that its because Dutchy has a contract to assure the airmail gets through no matter what and the airline will go under if they fail to do so. As everyone hates MacPherson anyway, Geoff assigns him to the riskiest flights.

This film was fully shot in the US but once again Hollywood magic succeeds in weaving an illusion of a bustling South American port city with muggy dirt streets, storm-lashed coconut trees and truckloads of bananas. Actually I’m not too sure about the geography of the place as it is supposed to be a port town, yet in order to deliver the mail they need to fly through a pass that is hemmed-in by scarily tall mountains. The film also shows a ridiculously high attrition rate for the pilots and aircraft. By the end of the film not a single pilot is left uninjured. How valuable can a contract to deliver mail be if they’re losing pilots and planes at this rate? At the same time, the technical details of the planes appear to be correct as are the procedures they need to follow and the dangers they have to face are plausible as well. In one mission, MacPherson has to land and take off from a rocky landing trip that cuts off abruptly with a steep cliff and it is completely understandable why Geoff hesitates to send anyone else to do it. After the mechanics patch up one of their damaged planes, Geoff takes it up himself to stress test it. It’s no wonder why this film has a following in the world of aviation.

The flying sequences and the tension of running such dangerous tensions unfortunately completely upstage the romance between Bonnie and Geoff. All of the other characters feel like they have a place and belong in Barranca but Bonnie doesn’t fit in at all and it seems that the actress who played her Jean Arthur had some difficulty understanding what it was Hawks was going for. Her character’s conflict of being in love with a man who has to continually risk his life flying isn’t that interesting and I really disliked how the other pilots kept flirting with her at first and then backed off when their boss, Geoff, appeared on the scene. The conflict of MacPherson’s wife is actually more interesting as she struggles to understand why her husband is being shunned by all of the other pilots and thus has to be the one to take all of the most dangerous jobs.

I also wished that the film made a better go at getting across the pilots’ sheer love of flying as the incentives to keep the flights going seemed to be mostly economic. Still I liked that Geoff does try his best to stay safe while getting the mail through and there is a very practical air to how he does things. All in all, a solid film about running an airline that holds up very well even today.