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.

My Gal Sal

I've been recording a bunch of movies that have recently started showing up in the FXM rotation. One of them is My Gal Sal. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 3) at 11:25 AM and again Tuesday at 7:30 AM.

Victor Mature plays Paul Dresser, born Dreiser and, yes, the older (by about 14 years) brother of writer Theodore Dreiser (who has a writing credit on this movie having written about his elder brother). At the start of the movie, Dresser is living in Indiana with his parents and younger siblings, about the right age to go off to seminary, which is something his father wants him to do, but something in which he has no interest. So Paul decides he's going to run off and try to make a name for himself.

He winds up as an unwitting prop in the medicine show run by Col. Truckee (Walter Catlett), who also bilks people in small towns in other ways. One of those small towns results in Paul's being tarred and feathered, only to be Mae Collins (Carole Landis), another member of the show. This gets Paul a full-time job in the show, doing novelty piano numbers playing songs he's written.

At one of these shows, a carriage shows up at the edges of the show. In the carriage are actress Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), and her boyfriend/manager Fred Haviland (John Sutton). Sally is the more respectable type of actress, who would be in New York if she could make it there but is instead doing a national tour; she and Fred are pretty clearly slumming by watching this small town show during a break in her Chicago performance. But she likes Paul's piano playing, so she gives him two tickets to the Chicago show.

Paul and Mae attend, and they've obviously never been to such a show, as the laugh at all the wrong times, this being a musical revue and not a comedy. Their overly loud laughing and otherwise uncouth manners enrage poor Sally, who decides that she hates Paul. Of course, the movie to this point has been set up such that we know that attitude is ultimately going to change by the last reel. But at this point, Sally hates Paul enough that she's perfectly OK stealing one of his songs.

Paul eventually leaves the medicine show and makes his way to New York, where he meets music publisher Pat Hawley (James Gleason). He's heard the big hit from Sally's new show, she now being in New York as well. And Paul realizes that it's the melody he wrote back in Indiana, with her having set new words to it! Paul is pissed, but thankfully, he's got the manuscript to prove that he wrote the song. So Sally is forced to join forces with Paul and put her face on the sheet music, along with both of their names.

Paul has by this time fallen in love with Sally, not realizing that Fred has already planned to propse marriage to her. Paul is also so obnoxiously forward with Sally that it's no wonder that Sally doesn't particularly respond well to his advances. It doesn't help that there's a Countess (Mona Maris) apparently trying to pursue Paul even though she's married. Along the way we get a bunch of musical numbers, on the way to Paul and Sally winding up together at the end.

My Gal Sal was released in early 1942, a couple of months after the US entered World War II. The movie is sentimental and old fashioned, considering that Dresser was at his peak of success in the Gay Nineties, but with a nation at war, you can understand why a certain segment of the population would love this sort of nostalgia. It fits in well with the sort of musical Fox was producing in the 1940s, although it's not quite as good as the musicals that featured Betty Grable. It's also not particularly true to history; as far as I could tell, there was no such actress as the Sally Elliott character in Dresser's life. (Dresser's life also ended badly once his brand of music fell out of style. That, of course, is not shown.)

My Gal Sal is available on DVD on two different Fox box sets if you don't have FXM.