Vol de nuit

A movie that airs fairly rarely on TCM despite being an MGM movie is Night Flight. The movie is based on a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is better remembered for The Little Prince but, having been a pilot himself, wrote books about aviation. Part of the reason for the movie' infrequency on TCM is that for decades it was in rights limbo. I only got to see part of it when it first aired a dozen years or so ago, so was thrilled to see it show up again on TCM to be able to record it and do a post here.

The theme, as you can guess, if flying at night, which is commonplace enough today but in the early days of aviation when instruments weren't so good was a much more risky proposition. MGM got the rights to the book and immediately set about coming up with an all-star cast to fill the roles. The beginning of the movie, however, seemingly has nothing to do with aviation as a mother is worried sick at a hospital in Rio de Janerio in Brazil where her kid is sick with a case of infantile paralysis (polio). However, the doctors find out that there's no serum anywhere in Rio, or in fact anywhere this side of the Andes, which means that the serum is going to have to be flown in special delivery from Santiago. And as luck would have it, the Trans-Andean European Air Mail company, run by Rivière (John Barrymore) is just about to institute flights by night to get mail -- and small packages like polio serum -- out faster. Tasked with flying from Santiago over the Andes to Buenos Aires, where another plain picks up everything from points west and south, is Pellerin (Robert Mongtomery).

Rivière is, unsurprisingly, a strict taskmaster. In his defense, that's in part because he has an exceedingly tight schedule to meet. Everything has to get in to Buenos Aires in time for the plane to Recife in northeastern Brazil to take off and meet a French cargo ship there, as that's the closest main port in South America to Africa, from where planes take off to Africa toward Europe. Although Rivière runs the company, he's not the President, and is up against the President and others who don't want to take the risk that planes might not be able to make it through the night to Buenos Aires.

Pellerin isn't the only pilot whose flight is chronicled. There's also Fabian (Clark Gable), who is flying out of Punta Arenas in the south of Chile together with a radio operator. Their flight takes them over the southernmost part of the Andes before getting to the ports on the Atlantic side of Argentina and making their way up the coast. However, this flight finds itself getting into weather issues that push them off course and threaten the make the flight too long for how much fuel they have on board. And, in addition to having to contend with the company president, Rivière also has to deal with Fabian's terrified wife (Helen Hayes), who just knows something is wrong.

Since the beginning of the movie dealt with a sick child in Rio de Janeiro, and all the planes land in Buenos Aires, there's also going to be a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio. That pilot is a Brazilian, played by William Gargan, and like Fabian, he's got a worried wife (played by Myrna Loy). Rounding out the cast is Robineau (Lionel Barrymore), a former police inspector now dishing out discipline for Rivière.

All of the subplots in Night Flight are reasonably well handled, and yet for some reason the movie feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's in part because there are so many stars and a relatively brief running time of under 90 minutes. There's not quite enough time for the characters to be well-developed, particularly Robert Montgomery's pilot. Still, Night Flight is a worthwhile watch with MGM bringing all the production values it could to what for the viewing public of 1933 would have been a novel topic.