Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Directed by Howard Hawks
A traveling performer arrives at a remote South American port town where the head of an air freight service must risk his pilots' lives to earn a major contract.
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What critics compared Only Angels Have Wings to
The story can be described in two ways: as a rip-off of Only Angels Have Wings, in which Paxton's implausibly intuitive tornado expert is torn between two women, his ex (Hunt) and his fiancée (Gertz), and two lives, a safe weatherman job, or a risky return to the group of crazily devoted storm-chasers trying to get a gizmo up inside a twister's 'suck-zone'; or as a repetitive spectacle where all that happens is that the objects hurled around in the air simply get bigger.
The film lifts its romantic melodramatics of the adventurer hero torn between two lovelies from "Only Angels Have Wings."
There’s a Howard Hawks-ian brio to director Joseph Kosinski’s Only The Brave, a relaxed, no-muss-no-fuss camaraderie of stoic men doing their jobs that in its best moments reminded me of Red River or Only Angels Have Wings.
Sully is foremost about control, harkening back to Howard Hawks films like Only Angels Have Wings in its exploration and admiration of the complexities of duty.
I’m for Rio Bravo today, to put it mildly, and if I had to select just one film to demonstrate what Howard Hawks is all about, it would vie at the top of the list with Only Angels Have Wings.
As critics have pointed out, the rich group dynamics recall such earlier Hawks masterpieces as Only Angels have Wings (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944).
It’s a template wonderfully employed by the director in such classics as Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep and His Girl Friday – here, the framework is transplanted to an airstrip in South America, where pilots working for a transport company headed by the fearless Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) risk their lives on a daily basis flying over rugged terrain in less than ideal conditions.
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The spirit Chazelle captures here is similar to that among the flyers in old Howard Hawks films like Only Angels Have Wings and The Dawn Patrol , or in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff .
The group shames Aldrin for following a tradition celebrated in pioneer aviation films like Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot and Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings: talking straight with fellow airmen about an aviator who made a mistake or wasn’t up to a task, no matter how compassionately and generously one might remember the person in private.
The most famous of all the films in this mode is assuredly Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings released ten years' after Porco Rosso takes place, but the romance extends into the silent era: the first Best Picture winner, 1927's Wings , is just such a story, and examples can be found still earlier.
The Martian boasts the group and individual heroics that have energized our aviation classics from Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings to Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff .