I really wanted The Last Flight to live up to its reputation as a great film. I'm not sure it is even a really good film. The story, said to be a knock-off of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, involves four WWI fliers who suffer from varying forms and degrees of PTSD. They leave for Paris and later Lisbon to "get tight and keep getting tight." One flier (Richard Barthelmess) has injured his hands while his best buddy (David Manners) has a nervous tic from eye surgery. The third flier (Johnny Mack Brown), a former college football star, is so punch drunk that he runs into the street and tries to tackle a horse. A fourth (Elliot Nugent) sleeps in all day and needs a chimed watch to wake him from slumber. They run into a boozy, ditzy heiress (Helen Chandler) with too much money and time on her hands and alternately act chivalrous and nasty towards her. Basically, that's the story -- drinking, drinking and more drinking by some guys who are self-medicating their PTSD. And for a modern film, that would be enough since these men have been prematurely stunted by the war. I'm not sure what the biggest problem is with the movie. The dialogue is way too non sequitur. German director Dieterle went on to better things (Devil and Daniel Webster, Portrait of Jennie). As this is only his first U.S. film perhaps his ear for English failed him and the actors -- or maybe they tried to write too much slang into the script. And then there is the acting -- a total mishmash of uncomplimentary styles. Barthelmess, a silent matinée idol, telegraphs every emotion through broad facial expressions. Manners, a stage actor who came to film because he could talk, declaims his lines as though this is the first opportunity he has been given to act. (And it might have been just that as Manners usually got stuck with the second lead/male ingenue parts.) Nugent needs only to sleepwalk through his part. Johnny Mack Brown, is the most authentic since he, a football hero turned cowboy actor, didn't have to act. Helen Chandler, in real life a bad alcoholic, also registers as authentic. The scenes with Chandler and the foursome drinking is Paris are probably the best parts. The viewer can almost get drunk by osmosis. Melodramatic complications arrive too abruptly near the end of the movie as though the producers told the writers to 'make something happen.' And, as if to drive that point home, Barthelmess' character somehow regains the use of his hands enough to shoot a gun without any pretext. Its lost generation angst filtered through the staccato style of early 30s Warner Brothers -- and it's just plain weird.
Review of The Last Flight
