Sometimes I'm in favor of the sky

A movie that sounded somewhat interesting from the TCM synopsis was Men Against the Sky. So I put it on my DVR, and recently got around to watching it.

Richard Dix gets top billing, although one of the plot threads has him absent for a fair bit of the movie. We see him at the start, however: he's Phil Mercedes, a stunt pilot who used to do the mail route in the days when pilots flying air mail was considered adventurous and romantic. But Phil drank too much, which is why he's reduced to barnstorming. Not only that, but he's stupid enough to get in the cockpit drunk, crashing his plane and gettin his pilot's license suspended. Perhaps his sister Kay (Wendy Barrie) can get a job to support the both of them.

Cut to the McLean aircraft company, owned by Dan McLean (Edmund Lowe). The US government is looking at re-arming, since there's a war going on in Europe, and they're interested in trying new aircraft designs. It would be a lucrative market, if only the McLean company could come up with anything that the government is interested in buying. If they can't get any good planes for the government, they'll go bankrupt.

The two plots come together in two ways. First, Kay has been studying drafting, and she tries to get a job working on technical drawings for the McLean company, working under engineer Martin Ames (Kent Taylor). The other way is that when Phil learns about the problems that McLean has. Phil has ideas, even though he's just a (former) pilot and not really an engineer. Still, he's able to come up with drawings that Kay can present to Martin and perhaps the company can try them.

The company is desperate enough that they are willing to try the new design. But as the test pilot is putting the plane through its paces, he realizes that it has a fatal design flaw if it goes through certain stresses. At this point, Phil comes out of the woodwork because he wants his idea to go through, and gets in the plane after the test pilot says it's not airworthy. Phil flies it, only to discover that the test pilot was right. One of the wings is shorn off during a dive, and Phil has to parachute to safety.

Now, Men Against the Sky is the sort of movie that you know is going to have at least a somewhat happy ending, so you might be asking yourself how the movie gets to that happy ending. I'm not going to reveal the answer here, other than to say that the plot contrivance they use is a bit ridiculous and strains all credulity. It also doesn't help that the special effects for the aerial scenes aren't very special, even by the standards of 1940. But then Men Against the Sky was a B movie.

One interesting thing to note is the screenwriting credit for Nathanael West. West was better known as a novelist, and his works Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust have both been turned into films. He was also married to Eileen McKinney, who was the Eileen in My Sister Eileen. I think I mentioned it at the time I wrote a post on My Sister Eileen, but the two were killed in a car crash not long after the release of Men Against the Sky on their way to F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral.