Cloud Captains

During 31 Days of Oscar, one of the movies that I recorded was Captains of the Clouds. Having been made at Warner Bros., it's unsurprisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently got around to watching it and doing a blog post on here.

Dennis Morgan plays Johnny Dutton, a bush pilot in northern Ontario circa 1939 who is in love with Emily Foster (Brenda Marshall), the daughter of a manager of one of the camps which the bush pilots support. His plan is to marry Emily and start an airline. When he tries to deliver a team of huskies to one of the bush camps, he finds that he's been beaten to the punch by Brian MacLean, James Cagney), who was able to do it more cheaply. Tiny (Alan Hale Sr.), British expat Scrounger (Reginald Gardiner), and Quebecker Blimp Lebec (George Tobias) also have gripes about how Brian has been undercutting them.

And then we meet MacLean, who isn't just a ruthless businessman, but one who takes risks in his flying and doesn't do things by the book. Of course, this is going to turn out to be the right thing in the final reel as with all those "unorthodox cop" movies, but boy is it going to cause heartache for everybody involved along the way. Indeed, it nearly kills Brian when he gets hit in the head by the still-rotating propeller of his plane.

While Brian is unconscious and recuperating, the other pilots find his notebook with a business deal that they pull out from under him and thereby force him into partnership. Brian, for his part, gets to know Emily better, and realizes that if Dutton marries her it's going to ruin his life and dreams for that airline. So Brian marries her to prevent this, but of course Dutton doesn't understand and basically disappears.

Sometime in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Brian and the other pilots hear Winston Churchill's speech about "We shall fight on the beaches", which triggers some patriotic instinct in them, so they try to join the RCAF as fighter pilots, doing this by literally landing their bush planes on an RCAF base outside Ottawa. They're too old, and frankly, their nation probably needs them as bush pilots helping keep all the northern raw materials operations going, not that the recruiters are going to get them to understand this.

Instead, the RCAF officers suggest that they become pilot instructors. The RCAF have definite methods of how pilots should operate in combat and bombing missions, but MacLean thinks that these methods aren't going to work out in the real world, so he teaches the guys in his planes how to do things by the seat of one's pants. This results in getting one of the student pilots seriously injured, so the RCAF understandably court-martials MacLean, dishonorably discharging him and getting his civil aviation license yanked.

However, some time later there's a serious plane accident that results in a bunch of death among the pilots whose job it is to fly the planes made in Canada over the Britain. They need new pilots. Blimp and Scrounger sign up for this duty, while MacLane sees this as his chance for redemption.

Captains of the Clouds is an interesting movie for a bunch of reasons. It was made with a lot of help from the RCAF, with real officers and flight footage. It was apparently produced in late 1941, just before the US was pushed into World War II, but released in February 1942, which is why there's a bit in the pilot graduation ceremony about the Americans who join up to help Canada and Britain. A few months later they'd all be in the US military. The movie is made in Technicolor with a lot of location shooting, and this too is really nice to see.

On the bad side however, is Cagney's character. He's irritating and seems to have an utter lack of common sense, as when he's rejected from being a fighter pilot for being too old. Also, when he's court-martialed, he and Tiny respond by trying to strafe the graduation ceremony, with terrible consequences! I don't understand why the guy doesn't wind up in jail.

But if you're looking for a snapshot of World War II that doesn't get shown as much as some of the other war movies, or a prestige film that doesn't show up as much as others from the same period, Captains of the Clouds is absolutely worth a watch.