806 Only Angels Have Wings

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swo17
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806 Only Angels Have Wings

#1 Post by swo17 » Fri Jan 15, 2016 4:43 pm

Only Angels Have Wings

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Electrified by the verbal wit and visual craftsmanship of the great Howard Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings stars Jean Arthur as a traveling entertainer who gets more than she bargained for during a stopover in a South American port town. There she meets a handsome yet aloof daredevil pilot, played by Cary Grant, who runs an airmail company, staring down death while servicing towns in treacherous mountain terrain. Both attracted to and repelled by his romantic sense of danger, she decides to stay on, despite his protestations. This masterful and mysterious adventure, featuring Oscar-nominated special effects, high-wire aerial photography, and Rita Hayworth in a small but breakout role, explores Hawks's recurring themes of masculine codes and the strong-willed women who question them.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio excerpts from a 1972 conversation between filmmakers Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich
• New interview with film critic David Thomson
Howard Hawks and His Aviation Movies, a new program featuring film scholars Craig Barron and Ben Burtt
• Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1939, starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Richard Barthelmess, and Thomas Mitchell, and hosted by director Cecil B. DeMille
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Sragow

Werewolf by Night

Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#2 Post by Werewolf by Night » Fri Jan 15, 2016 6:27 pm

I'm really not too excited to buy this less than a year after I bought the TCM release, but the extras look very enticing, especially for the Hawks fan.

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Finch
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#3 Post by Finch » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:19 pm

Looking forward to revisiting this film as I wasn't quite as enamoured with it as with His Girl Friday or even Twentieth Century. Hopefully these two will be part of Criterion's deal with Sony.

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domino harvey
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#4 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:26 pm

Surprised they couldn't get McCarthy to contribute something, his biography of Hawks is one of my all time favorite film books

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#5 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:46 pm

Werewolf by Night wrote:I'm really not too excited to buy this less than a year after I bought the TCM release, but the extras look very enticing, especially for the Hawks fan.
How was the PQ for the TCM and do you think Criterion can improve upon it?

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feihong
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#6 Post by feihong » Fri Jan 15, 2016 8:48 pm

They could definitely improve upon the contrast––the TCM disc looks pretty dark. However, the TCM disc is very good-looking in motion, and I can sympathize with the fatigue there. The Criterion edition will probably be a bit better, but...what was the point of this, when there are so many movies out there with no blu ray release at all? By way of example, His Girl Friday springs to mind.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#7 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Jan 15, 2016 8:56 pm

I think it's a silly deal that Sony and TCM have that causes these re-releases. Same thing happened with The Lady From Shanghai. Wouldn't be surprised if His Girl Friday falls victim to the same deal.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#8 Post by Rayon Vert » Fri Jan 15, 2016 9:01 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:I think it's a silly deal that Sony and TCM have that causes these re-releases. Same thing happened with The Lady From Shanghai.
Indeed, and in this case it's very disappointing. This is one of my favorite films, but for financial reasons I'll have to pass after getting the TCM blu.

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tenia
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#9 Post by tenia » Sat Jan 16, 2016 8:08 am

The TCM release always looked like a very cheap one to me in terms of work put into : no SDH subs, no extras, a debatable contrast.
Being a TCM-store exclusive, it also would have been a chore to import it from France, so I always waited for somebody to do a better and more easily accessible job on this one, just like what happened with The Lady from Shanghai. I'm glad to see my patience is being rewarded. It also means to me that I'll never buy any interesting TCM-release since they're getting "upgraded" not long after their release...

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#10 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Jan 16, 2016 1:23 pm

tenia wrote:The TCM release always looked like a very cheap one to me in terms of work put into : no SDH subs, no extras, a debatable contrast.
Being a TCM-store exclusive, it also would have been a chore to import it from France, so I always waited for somebody to do a better and more easily accessible job on this one, just like what happened with The Lady from Shanghai. I'm glad to see my patience is being rewarded. It also means to me that I'll never buy any interesting TCM-release since they're getting "upgraded" not long after their release...
I'll heed your advice next time. I'm in Canada, and with the shipping and exchange rates, it's not uncommon for these things to cost me $50+.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#11 Post by feihong » Sat Jan 16, 2016 10:51 pm

Hopefully Remember the Night will get a better release somewhere else, then.

I'm just getting a bit fatigued with upgrades. With DVDs, I would wait for years before buying a title, looking at comparisons until I felt like one was definitely preferable. But so many of these blu rays go out of print so quickly that it's hard to feel I have that luxury. So I generally buy them as soon as they become available, and if a decent upgrade appears, I buy that, too. Lady from Shanghai I went through that, like a lot of people here. Now again with Only Angels have Wings, probably. The TCM stuff is getting kind of frustrating. I'll probably think twice the next time they announce some gem of yesteryear. I've also been through months of upgrading Jackie Chan movies on blu ray, hunting out the better-quality discs from a mountainload of Fortune Star dross––I like Jackie Chan films, and especially a few of them, but of HK new wave movie people he is perhaps the least interesting to me. Curiosity and enthusiasm has seen me through all that, but it's left me poorer and wiser and a little enervated.

It used to be that my Wong Kar Wai films were the ones I constantly upgraded––and really only those, because new editions would come out in Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, etc. I used to spend about $100–$120 on WKW movies before I had a really good edition in hand; I'd buy the cheap versions released soon after the film played in theaters, in order to see the movies. I'd buy better editions from HK, better editions from the U.S., better re-release editions from HK, etc., until I had a really good copy. But those were films I loved really deeply, and to which I felt a kind of intense personal connection back then. I don't want to have to do it for every film in my collection I quite admire.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#12 Post by swo17 » Sat Jan 16, 2016 11:30 pm

I can't really complain since I was able to sell my TCM edition for $50 shortly after the Criterion was hinted.

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feihong
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#13 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 17, 2016 1:48 am

That's a pretty sweet deal. But what happens if Criterion screws it up, and the TCM disc ends up the better transfer?

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swo17
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#14 Post by swo17 » Sun Jan 17, 2016 2:00 am

That's what happened to me selling off the BFI Tati releases. If it were that big of a difference and I cared enough, I suppose I could try to buy the TCM back. If I could get one for about $50 (which currently seems to be the going price) then I'd be in roughly the same position I was before.

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feihong
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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#15 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 17, 2016 2:18 am

I never sell early enough to make it worthwhile. I'm too paranoid about hanging on to the discs in case they turn out to be better than the ones they're releasing later.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#16 Post by nitin » Sun Jan 17, 2016 10:03 pm

the TCM is OOP, so for those that didnt get it, it is nice to have an alternative available.

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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#17 Post by Ribs » Wed Mar 16, 2016 5:17 pm


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Re: 806 Only Angels Have Wings

#18 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Apr 19, 2016 6:25 am


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Mr Sausage
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Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#19 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Nov 21, 2016 8:32 pm

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, DECEMBER 5th

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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#20 Post by knives » Mon Nov 21, 2016 8:44 pm

I don't have much to say, but I recently rewatched this for the All Time list so I might as well. When I first saw it fairly early on in my interest in cinema I was nonplussed by it to say the least. It was an okay film with some nice performances, but nothing in the way of special. With the benefit of understanding its context and creator better along with just enjoying the mode of classic Hollywood better it came across a lot better, but all the same doesn't seem significant in any manner. Everything works, even the romance shockingly, and it is just a pleasure watching the contortions on the ideas of masculinity. Yet it slips by almost as a trifle with all of this death and sincere mourning attached to the struggles to deal with age and weakness come across as nothing more than a game by Hawks. Perhaps this distrusting feeling comes from the leads who I associate so closely with comedy, this is probably the most serious I've ever seen Cary Grant the star, though that doesn't seem like a satisfactory explanation.

I suppose this is all just to ask if and why anyone feels more strongly for the film.

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domino harvey
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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#21 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 21, 2016 8:59 pm

It doesn't surprise me that Hawks left you cold if you started watching his films early in your film education, as his famed "invisible style" (itself something of a misnomer) is by definition difficult to elucidate except by comparative example and overall employment! Hawks more than maybe any other auteur requires consideration alongside his other works: this is not a pick-and-choose auteur. It sounds like you've now given the film a fair shake twice and it doesn't wow you. Fair enough!

This quite easily will be making my All Time List, and to me this film is the finest distillation of Hawks' obsession with men who are the best at what they do and the rare women who keep up with the boys. If you can't cut it, you die. What could be a cold or unfeeling outlook feels just the opposite, however: camaraderie is there for those who deserve it. And apologies to Clint Eastwood but "deserve" has everything to do with the protagonists of Hawks' films, especially this one. You're either in or you're out. That's life. That's Hawks.

The easiest tl;dr for the protagonists in Hawks' films is that they are the Cool Table!

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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#22 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Nov 21, 2016 9:26 pm

I don't know that this is a movie that stands out as one of my favorite Hawks- it's not as fun as I Was a Male War Bride, not as cool as The Big Sleep, not as chill as Rio Bravo, etc- but it is, maybe, the most Hawks, the one where his themes are laid most bare. Other Hawks movies have these kind of guys doing these kind of things, but usually they're doing it for more important causes- war, or other life or death matters- or they're up against a wall and kind of forced into it, or the crew is emphasized more than the danger. In something like Red River, there's kind of a challenge to the get it done at any cost mindset that Jean Arthur slowly realizes is so core to these guys that they don't even realize they've bought into it, and the patriarchal figure most analogous to Grant here is depicted as something of a monster.

Here, though, these guys are absolutely reckless in risking their lives to save a small business for an owner who quite explicitly doesn't want them to do it. They'd rather die than stop, all of them, that is the core of self that forms the group in this one. By normal standards, these dudes should be unbearable, the most extreme macho dirtbags one could picture, who can't really accept women into their midst unless the women buy into their self destruction. It should feel like Top Gun only moreso. That Hawks pulls it off, and makes you not only like these guys but more or less accept that their way of living is (if not reasonable) at least kind of understandable, and right for them, is a small miracle, but it's a miracle that once accepted is kind of key to a lot of what Hawks is about. Dom is right- you're being invited into the cool kids table. Turns out, the cool kids are all fucking nuts, but it's still an exciting place to be.
Last edited by matrixschmatrix on Mon Nov 21, 2016 10:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#23 Post by Rayon Vert » Mon Nov 21, 2016 10:15 pm

domino harvey wrote:This quite easily will be making my All Time List, and to me this film is the finest distillation of Hawks' obsession with men who are the best at what they do and the rare women who keep up with the boys. If you can't cut it, you die. What could be a cold or unfeeling outlook feels just the opposite, however: camaraderie is there for those who deserve it.
I can't find much to say either, but this is very well put. Easily my favorite Hawks film, along with Red River. The film works on all levels - Grant is fantastic, the themes around the menace of death makes this film very mature-feeling relative to the majority of the Hollywood output, and at the same time you have a lot of charm, romance, comedy, and terrific aviation scenes. Plenty of atmosphere too. And that typical inclusion, for Hawks, of a musical interlude out of nowhere, and a really enjoyable one!

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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#24 Post by knives » Tue Nov 22, 2016 12:58 am

I do want to make it clear that the rewatch made it raise extremely higher in my estimation. There's a lot of great things going on particularly with the side characters who are all just different enough from what they would be in a lesser film to really enrich the whole. The redemptive pilot is the obvious choice, but Matrix's reference to the rather kind owner is probably the best example of what the film is doing right.

It just so happens that Dom's also right about Hawks working best when the whole tapestry is filled, I don't think I liked a film of his until I saw nine or so, and with 27 films strong now even as fascinating a film as this looks and feels like a comparative B pic.

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Re: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

#25 Post by Gregory » Tue Nov 22, 2016 2:09 am

What's being described here as the protagonists' group is what Robin Wood says in his Rio Bravo book is what one might call the "self-respect club," case in point when John Wayne's character tells Dickinson's that if she doesn't want to be mistaken for a card cheat she should stop gambling and dressing in feathers, she says that's what she'd do "if I were the kind of girl you think I am."
Hawks's best films have such a keen sense of what's at stake for each character and what role a woman could interestingly play within a group in ostensibly male-centered genres. It's not just about inclusivity by a long shot, I think, but about how interesting it can get when well-written parts like those of Hayworth and Arthur here are put into the mix of a male enclave with stakes that treat them as people who have to prove themselves just as anyone else—i.e., for Hawks not nearly as simplistically as normal redemptive character arcs as other films where noble acts in battle are what show earned respect for a character. That, I think, is the reason that one of the weakest of Hawks's well-known films is Sergeant York, as it was so tied to the basic premise of "rube makes good, killing a bunch of the enemy!"
I've always found something really moving about Only Angels that I'm sure would do no good to try to describe.

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