Howard Hughes is a madman that made one incredible movie. It's a technical marvel for the time. Coming out in 1930, directly in between the transition of silent to sound movies. It's fully in sound, although much of the style is still similar to the silent era. There's color film tinting to show when a scene is taking place at night and when germans are speaking their dialogue is shown with title cards instead of subtitles. It's a spectacular representation of the two eras and the transition from one to another. What makes this special is this monolithic position it has, the awe-inspiring special effects and stunts, and Howard Hughes' burning passion that is impossible to ignore while viewing the…

1st Howard Hughes

What hasn't aged worst is the clumsy plotting, the stilted acting or the choppy silence to sound sequences, it's how the film thinks about Jean Harlow. It's clear Hughes and co. want her to come off as a heartless vamp, too shallow for the right-thinking Roy whose only crime is that he loved her too much. We're supposed to be revolted by her when he finally sees her in the arms of another soldier and she cruelly rebuffs him. The problem is, she's got a point. Far from being a moral backbone, Roy is exhaustingly self-absorbed, so hung up on ideas of goodness that he doesn't acknowledge Helen as a human being. And it's exhausting for Helen…

Howard Hughes film that is as expected, in the sense that it's ambitious, epic in scale and dramatically messy (Hughes had no background as a movie director) and also in the way women are strictly on the margins and treated as dingbats and possessions. Jean Harlow's character is a bit of a travesty, not through any fault of the actress (just 19 at the time) but because she's a heartless tart and completely irrelevant to the plot, simply disappearing at one point never to return.

That said, her seduction early on of her boyfriend's brother (Ben Lyon) is one of the hottest things ever put to screen, the kind of thing the code was designed to put a stop to,…

Howard Hughes’ Great War epic Hell’s Angels looks fantastic today due to Hughes’ meticulous archiving practices. Shot initially as a silent, it was reshot with sound after the debut of The Jazz Singer (1927,) significantly delaying its release and ballooning its budget. Hell’s Angels looks very much like a silent film in terms of artistic approach and the sound elements are well recorded, especially for 1930. Some tinted scenes and an extended two strip technicolor segment help to amplify the drama. The aerial photography is fascinating to watch. Some of the shots defy ready explanation for how they were even captured. These images are combined with some amazing model work and elaborate sets that come together almost seamlessly.

Unfortunately the…

Two Angelic Sequences, and the Rest Is Hell

I suppose some enthusiastic reviews, while I apparently ignored the negative ones, but mostly Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic “The Aviator” (2004), led me to the impression that “Hell’s Angels” was supposed to be a good film. But, it’s not. It’s what I should’ve expected from the inexperienced heir of an oil-drill-bit fortune trying to remake the Great War dogfighting blockbuster “Wings” (1927) as an early talkie. Granted, Hughes had enough engineering acumen and passion for aviation to produce two aerial warfare sequences that rival those in Bill Wellman’s picture, but the rest of this is a dreadful melodrama.

I’ve seen some claim this an anti-war drama, but it’s not. The character…

it's all about the transition, the seamless but nonetheless organic and tangible shift of focus from the purely visual silent-film sequences to the newly-implemented sound movie segments. it's all about the witnessing of a coming age, a celebration of what's come in the past, and a marriage of both in a great big trial by fire. the format — in a constant, friendly tug-of-war between two distinct eras of filmmaking — is perhaps mirrored in the narrative itself. what starts out as a decadent, extravagant story of human relationships, friendship and love (complete with ball sequences shot in colour) gives way to explosions and more explosions. there are explosions in the sky... in the air... in the tiny spaces between…

I'm not well versed yet in those first talkies, but what I've learned so far is that they need to be viewed within the historical context. There's definitely an awkwardness that inhabits them, it's almost as if it wasn't only the movies that had just learned to talk, but the actors, too. It's all a little stiff, all a little static. They aren't smooth films. But the great thing about them is how clear a sense you get for the craft of filmmaking. You can literally feel how these people came together and tried to figure out how to put ideas into images. How they must have failed so often before they succeeded. And there's something beautiful about that —…

Hell's Angels transcended my expectations in terms of what I anticipated to come from the one and only Howard Hughes, him and his macho-man, sexist, big airplane, big explosion, big money, big mammary glands, big action, big brouhaha brain of his. After reading Higham's biography it's clear to see that Hughes took all of his interests out on a stroll in his costly war drama, meandering upon two hours of expensive footage, capturing a mediocre love triangle and a smorgasbord of planes frolicking around in gunfire and voluptuous clouds.
Although, I must say that the technological innovation in terms of camera work and special effects cannot be overlooked: the multi camera shots and close ups are very impressive for the…

My path to Hell's Angels was pretty sophisticated; I saw Howard Hughes shooting the movie's dog fights in The Aviator and thought, damn, that looks pretty cool. And wouldn't ya know it, Hell's Angels is pretty cool. Famously, and by that I mean also dramatized in The Aviator, Hell's Angels spent so long in production that it was originally conceived as a silent movie but had to be retroactively fitted for sound once the talkies hit, which meant both adding sound to filmed material and reshooting dialogue scenes outright. That jank between filmmaking modes ended up being a real boon, as it means we've got a sound movie full of silent techniques like color tinting. Even title cards get used…