HELL'S ANGELS On Blu-ray From Criterion

 

The 1930 WWI aviation spectacular HELL'S ANGELS, produced and directed by the legendary Howard Hughes, gets the special-edition Criterion treatment. 

Most people today know about HELL'S ANGELS from watching Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic THE AVIATOR. But Scorsese's film only scratched the surface when it came to documenting the mammoth production history of Hughes' dream project. HELL'S ANGELS started out as a silent feature, but during the long shooting schedule Hughes reworked the story into a talkie, recast the leading female role, and even added in a color sequence. All the while, Hughes spent plenty of time (and money) on numerous flying stunts and sequences that had never been attempted before, and probably never will again. 

The result is a curious mix of incredible aerial feats and clunky dialogue scenes (with some excellent practical effects thrown in). The movie truly does soar when it takes to the air--but on the ground it betrays its early talkie origins. 

The two underwhelming leading men of HELL'S ANGELS are Ben Lyon and James Hall as brothers Monte and Roy, who join the British air force at the outbreak of the Great War. Monte (Lyon) is weak and irresponsible, while Roy (Hall) is a stuffed-shirt type. Lyon and Hall are not the most dynamic actors, and their characters are not very engaging. Both men get overshadowed by the very young Jean Harlow in her breakthrough role. Harlow is supposed to be playing an upper-class Englishwoman of the late teens, but she's really nothing more than sexy Roaring Twenties eye candy. Harlow has plenty of screen presence, but she's even more awkward in the dialogue sequences than Lyon and Hall are, and she doesn't actually have a lot of screen time. (Harlow was only 18 when she essayed this role, and Marian Marsh, who has a cameo as a girl trying to entice men to sign up for the war, was even younger than that.) 

Some may watch HELL'S ANGELS for Harlow, but it's the flying sequences that make this film memorable, with a nighttime attack on a zeppelin and a behind-the-lines bombing of a German ammunition dump. Howard Hughes was a technological innovator, and he was determined to use sound to make his film as cutting-edge as possible, but I think he would have been better off to have kept the audio of the planes & battles while going the silent route with the dialogue scenes. (James Whale, at the very beginning of his Hollywood career, worked on those dialogue scenes, but one gets the sense he wasn't able to do what he wanted with them, and he didn't like Jean Harlow at all.) 

Criterion presents HELL'S ANGELS in a "Magnascope" version, with most of the film in a standard 1.37:1 aspect ratio, while the action sequences are in 1.54:1. The movie is uncut, with certain scenes tinted and a special color sequence where one realizes Jean Harlow truly was a platinum blonde. 

The extras include a short program with Robert Legato, the FX supervisor on THE AVIATOR, who discusses the visuals of HELL'S ANGELS. Farran Smith Nehme narrates a concise and excellent half-hour mini-bio of Jean Harlow, while about five minutes of outtakes from the film are shown with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn (Howard Hughes himself appears in this footage). As usual with Criterion releases, this disc comes with a booklet essay. Written by Fred Kaplan, the author states that HELL'S ANGELS was much more cynical than the other WWI epics made up to that time. 

What is sorely missing on this HELL'S ANGELS Blu-ray is an audio commentary. The making of this film is at times more fascinating than what is actually in it. One can only wonder what the silent version of this film could have been, with Greta Nissen playing Harlow's part and Thelma Todd even making an appearance. Plenty of urban legends have sprung up over HELL'S ANGELS, but even with its mediocre talkie sequences the aerial scenes alone make it an amazing achievement from Howard Hughes, one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th Century.