Product Description

British brothers become world war i pilots and fall for a platinum blonde. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 12/07/2004 Starring: Ben Lyon James Hall Run time: 135 minutes Rating: Pg Director: Howard Hughes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8326 in DVD
• Brand: Universal Studios
• Released on: 2004-12-07
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, German
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 127 minutes

Amazon.com
Two bright facets light up Hell's Angels, a 1930s aviation melodrama. One is the extraordinary footage re-creating World War I air battles; the other is 18-year-old Jean Harlow. Both are enough to offset the cornball story and stilted dialogue, the latter added late in production, with the advent of motion-picture sound. The movie, almost three years in the making, with a budget of nearly $4 million--very high for its day--was the obsession of eccentric millionaire director Howard Hughes. Apparently, the authenticity of the dogfight scenes was so important to Hughes that he piloted a plane himself, and ended up breaking a few bones in the process. More shocking, it's said that three pilots lost their lives making the movie. The sequence depicting an epic encounter between the British Royal Flying Corps and a German zeppelin is especially stunning, thanks to the eye-popping use of hand tinting. A bombing raid on a German munitions depot is also remarkably convincing.

The movie's other bombshell, Jean Harlow, fairly jumps off the screen as an upper-class floozy who plays fast and loose with the two leading men, RFC pilots Monte and Roy Rutledge (Ben Lyon and James Hall), one a scoundrel and one a saint. Harlow glows in the film--it's immediately obvious why her appearance here put her on the fast track to Hollywood stardom. Beauty, sex appeal, vulnerability, audacity--whatever the intangible something is that makes a movie star, it's clear Harlow had it, even as a teenager. --Laura Mirsky

Customer Reviews

Hell's Angels in Bi-Planes
Hell?s Angels is an amazing film. It is certainly the best WWI aviation film, although Wings runs it close, and it has flying sequences that are simply staggering, because they are so obviously real. There is a wonderful sequence depicting the attack on an enormous Zeppelin which shows how the giant airship actually operated and gives a sense of its size, slowness and vulnerability. Also worthy of note is a mass dogfight involving a captured German bomber, Baron Von Richthofen?s Flying Circus and what seems like most of the Royal Flying Corps. At times the sky is filled with bi-planes performing thrilling manoeuvres, but the film does not fail to show the individuals in this fight and to point out the horrific human cost of the fighting. Hell?s Angels is in fact surprisingly violent, showing men consumed in flames and screaming to their deaths. Actually it is remarkably frank in a number of ways. Jean Harlow gives a star-making performance which oozes sex. She never looked better especially when uttering her famous line ?Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?? Here is a woman who knows what she wants and doesn?t allow conventions to get in her way. What?s more the film doesn?t attempt to tone-down this characterization. She frankly admits she wants nothing to do with marriage and family values and it is this frankness which must have seemed so shocking to contemporary audiences. Hell?s Angels is also not afraid to show flyers full of fear and questioning the point of the war. It?s most sympathetic character is a coward who just wants to live. The story is thus rather unusual, especially for a war film, for it does not contain the heroics and the heroes so familiar from the genre, but rather shows the grim determination of scared men to get the job done.

It is possible to find a few criticisms of this film. The two leading men are only adequate as actors and lack the charisma of more familiar thirties leading men. Furthermore they are not particularly convincing as Englishmen for they make little attempt to disguise their American accents. Also the German characters are a little too stereotypical and at times slightly ludicrous, especially in one scene where they show their Teutonic willingness to die for the Fatherland by jumping from a Zeppelin.

The print used for this MCA Universal video is first class. It has been restored so that it includes some tinted night and early morning scenes and includes a wonderful early Technicolor party scene. The sound is better than is often the case with early talkies; there is very little background noise, although there are some snatches of dialogue which are a little indistinct. This is a high quality video and essential viewing for fans of WWI aviation films.

Still remarkably entertaining
Three reasons to watch this film:
- still-teenaged Jean Harlow, radiant in her only Technicolor footage, and giving a much better performance under the direction of (I assume) James Whale than she would in "Public Enemy" a year later;
- a riveting nighttime Zeppelin attack with an astounding payoff;
- aerial battle scenes unmatched for realism that truly convey the terror of fights-to-the-death in the skies (apparently three pilots died doing the remarkable stunts).

Ben Lyon is the only lead performer whose acting seems fairly modern and somewhat natural while the other male leads are still stuck in that strange, stilted early-talkie mode (the film was begun as a silent and morphed into a talkie over a two-year shoot spanning 1928-1930). The biggest flaw is the ridiculous stereotypical portrayal of the German commanders as sadistic Huns straight out of a WWI propaganda film; this is the most dated element in what remains, given the period in which it was produced, an amazingly entertaining film, beautifully restored in its current DVD incarnation by UCLA film restoration experts.

A Landmark Aviation Film
I happened to catch this film for the first time on the big screen on August 6th, at the classic Alex Theatre in Glendale, CA. What an experience! Yes, the dialogue was corny and somewhat dated, although, I feel that many reviewers tend to somewhat over-exaggerate this just a bit in their assessment of the film. The eight-minute two-color sequence is worth viewing in itself (especially seeing that this is the only existing color footage of the beautiful Jean Harlow) as an early example of the evolution of technicolor. The battle sequences had the audience on the edge of their seats, and the sultry Harlow had the audience in an uproar. All in All, this film is worth owning because of it's historical significance alone, and the non-aerial scenes are quite enjoyable and breath-taking. We must remember that films, like everything else, are products of the era in which they're made, and we must keep in mind that the political correctness which saturates today's films may seem "corny" as well, some fifty-sixty years from now.