The Lost Squadron

The Lost Squadron is one of five movies directed by George Archainbaud in 1932.  Ingenious and exciting, the film is about 80 minutes long.  Despite its modest running time, the film is a first-rate production starring Richard Dix who shows a stiff upper lip and is gallant to the end, the very young and baby-faced Joel McCrea, Erich von Stroheim at his most villainous and Mary Astor playing fickle, ambitious actress.  The script is so good that the film cries out to be remade -- it could be produced effectively in any post-war era and, in our modern history, we seem to be always post-war.  (In fact, I think the movie may have been remade in 1975 as the The Great Waldo Pepper.)  The picture is consistently entertaining and stands up well almost eighty years after it was produced -- it is astonishing the amount of narrative and characterization that Hollywood craftsman could include in a movie well under 90 minutes.

The Lost Squadron begins on the Western Front, a minute or two before November 11, 11:00 am armistice in 1918.  The three surviving pilots in the squadron are dueling with their German counterparts high in the sky -- the film identifies the nationality of each combatant by a superimposed emblem in the lower right side of the screen.  After some spectacular aerial shots, the war ends and the combatants wave adieu to one another in a jaunty way before landing and getting drunk to celebrate the end of the War.  The squadron, reduced to four men by casualties, is comprised of the braggart Red, Captain Gibson, the commanding officer, Woody, an avuncular drunk (today we would says that he is badly damaged by Post-Traumatic Stress) and the mechanic, Chris.  Returning home, each pilot finds that, notwithstanding the speeches of the politicians, there is no real place for them in the peace-time world.  Red resigns his job so that another older man who supports a family will not lose his position with the company; Captain Gibson finds that his upper-class girlfriend, who now is an ambitious Broadway actress, is living with a fat, tolerant banker who supports her acting; Woody has been defrauded by a business partner and is impoverished.  The three pilots and their mechanic vow to always assist one another.  The economy crashes and Red, Captain Gibson, and Chris end up as hobos riding the rails.  They climb off the freight train in Hollywood where Woody, now a doomed alcoholic, is flying stunts for war pictures -- he gets 50 dollars a day and suggests that his buddies join him on the set where Von Furst, a megalomaniacal director (Erich von Stroheim of course) is making a West Front war movie.  Von Furst, who struts around in cape carrying a nasty-looking cane, is rumored to beat "the bejeesus out of his wife", the actress Foliette, who is Captain Gibson's old flame.  The men go to work for Von Furst who quickly grasps that Captain Gibson still admires Foliette.  (There is a subplot involving the "pest", the kid-sister of Woody. A romantic triangle ensues in which both Captain Gibson and Red vie for the girl's affections.  Red wins out to the dismay of Captain Gibson who is too noble to show his friend any trace of jealousy).  Von Furst tells his camera crew to "keep cranking" in the event of a crash -- this will add to the picture's luster.  Woody is now drinking too much to fly safely, although he, ultimately, takes to the air in a biplane that Von Furst has sabotaged -- the evil director is trying to kill Captain Gibson. This aircraft is flamboyantly decorated with a skeleton wielding a scythe. The plane crashes spectacularly and Woody is killed -- this leads to Red murdering Von Furst.  The movie's high energy lags a little in some suspense scenes in which a detective inspects the film set where Von Furst's body has been stashed.  (This part of the movie shot mostly in the dark reminds us that Archainbaud would make a series of mystery movies beginning later in 1932 and that he specialized in the genre before directing Westerns for the next quarter century.  Archainbaud, a studio hack, ended up in the Valhalla of all studio hacks, that is TV making Westerns for the tube.  He seems to be an efficient, reasonably ingenious director, although many of his scenes are simply shot proscenium-style with the actors playing to one another ensemble-style.  He seems to have been the reliable kind of workman who was as good as the actors and the material that he directed -- in The Lost Squadron, it all comes together, a stellar cast and an excellent script and the result is a very good film.)  The movie, made pre-Code, contains the first image of someone being given "the finger" that I have seen in film and has gorgeous aerial sequences -- the bi-planes seem as light as kites and they execute loops and turns against majestic towering clouds.  When a plane falls out of the sky, the little aircraft drops like a leaf shed by a tree in autumn, wobbling plaintively and spiraling end-over-end:  the immediacy of these scenes reminds me of the exquisite aerial ballets in Only Angels have Wings and, later, the aircraft plummeting out of the stratosphere in Phil Kaufman's The Right Stuff.  The final shots, showing two ghost planes realized in negative, flying through stormy skies are jaw-dropping.