WWI Watch: Hell's Angels (1930)

Watched:  07/11/2026

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Howard Hughes

Even back in film school I remember hearing or reading that Howard Hughes' production of Hell's Angels (1930) had been kind of out of control.  It took years to make as Hughes was, ahem, a tad OCD and then The Jazz Singer happened during the already lengthy shoot,  sound suddenly available during the middle of production - of course Hughes wanted in on that.  They had to fire one of their leads - who had a serious Swedish accent - and replace her with Jean Harlow, effectively locking Harlow in as sort of the first blonde bombshell.  I also knew a few people died making the movie - and having watched this thing, I can see how that could have occurred.

What I did not know is that Hell's Angels is actually a very watchable movie and was not really what I was expecting.  

The plot sounds fairly simple on paper - a pair of brothers at Oxford, one a rule-follower and romantic, the other a bit more of a rake and nihilist - find that WWI has broken out.  One brother volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps, and the other is voluntold he's in the RFC.  Meanwhile, their German pal Karl is drafted into the Zeppelin corps.  

The rule-follower brother has a girlfriend in Jean Harlow who the other brother rightly pegs as messing with his brother and pretending to be a good girl when she is anything but.  Hughes, of course, was unsubtle in his appreciation/ male-gazey display of women in his films.  And, because we keep it real at The Signal Watch, I never really got the Jean Harlow thing before.  I absolutely get it now - stills don't really capture her energy.  And I'll watch Red Dust because I think she'd be terribly interesting to see with Clark Gable.  

The melodrama is fine - and it's very pre-Code, so it feels positively naughty compared to movies you'd see by the 1940's.  But we're here for aerial combat, and, holy shit, does this movie deliver.

In between the big set pieces, we watch the two brothers grapple with exactly who Jean Harlow's character is and how it impacts them on the ground.  The steadfast brother is going up on missions nightly while his less scrupulous brother is maybe more clear headed about how mad all of this is - but he's behaving erratically, the madness of their job taking its toll.

Remember the part where I said "a few people died making the movie" a few paragraphs above?  I can absolutely see how that happened.  This movie is *stunning* and if you know anything about World War 1 aircraft, safety, and explosions - something bad was bound to happen here.  I am unclear on the number of dead pilots and crew this movie racked up, nor the elements that led to those deaths, but I think it's safe to say more than zero deaths is a lot.  

One surprise is that, unlike The Dawn Patrol - released the same year, there's not multiple sequences of combat - just two, really, but both are lengthy and stressful to watch. 

The first is a Zeppelin attack on London which goes... poorly for a number of reasons, and ends with a bang.  The second is a daring bombing raid in a stolen German bomber, followed by the bomber falling prey to The Red Baron's "Flying Circus" and an English squadron entering the fray.  It is *a lot*.

As near as I can tell, Hughes really blew up some structures either as scaled miniatures that look great or... and I would not be shocked if true... they built structures to blow them the hell up.  It looks incredible.  

But as good as that looks - it's the dog fights that are breathtaking.  And, really, may have given us the language for how we see these things in movies today, including Top Gun flicks and Star Wars.  

What I wasn't anticipating - and again, I'd seen Dawn Patrol - is the sense of doom that pervades the second half of the movie.  It's not that movies about foot soldiers or the trenches aren't about the relentless grind of being tossed against one another in waves of bullets and blood.  It's something about being asked to take to the skies day after day when you have a massively high chance of not coming back, and your death will likely be from your plane bursting into flames and you'll have some time to think about it - if you aren't ripped apart by the enemy's gunfire.  And so the pilots almost treat it like "ha, fair enough, you got me" as they get picked off. 

And maybe that's just part of narratives about WWI.  There's just a nihilism that came out of the Great War that we get told about in school reading All Quiet on the Western Front and maybe reading some Hemingway on our own time, that - if nothing else, Hollywood managed to turn into stars and stripes forever during WWII as part of the propaganda machine.  

I am unsure Howard Hughes would have thought of this movie as "anti-war", but it sure does take a look at how bad things were for pilots in WWI.  And if you know the stats, it bears out.  Something like 20-25% of pilots were KIA.  It really was batshit to be taking planes made of wood and fabric up into the air and then shoot at each other or absorb flack from groundfire.  And it leads to certain conclusions by the 2/3rds point - that even as he's seen as a ranting coward, maybe Monte is right and all of this is fucking crazy.

But that ending?  Would never have survived the Hayes office.  

I haven't gotten into the use of color, etc...  anyway - I think it's worth a watch some time.  It's interesting that this movie was largely seen as a spectacle amounting to not much by contemporary critics.  Maybe there was snobbishness about Hughes, maybe there was a flood of WW1 material.  And they seem almost dismissive of the spectacle of the thing, which seems mind-boggling.  But here we are 90 years later enjoying a restoration re-release.  

By the way - it's also in Public Domain at this time, so it should be widely available.  I happened to watch it hosted by TMC's terrific film historian Alicia Malone.