John Monk Saunders wrote stories that were turned into two 1933 antiwar films; the first, The Eagle and the Hawk, was released in May, and the second, Ace of Aces, came out in October. They're thematically similar films, both dealing with pilots during the First World War who are dramatically changed by their experiences. Of the two films, Eagle is far superior because it's far more subtle and because its stars, Fredric March and Cary Grant, are able to bring more to their parts than Richard Dix is here. A glance through Saunders's brief filmography (he committed suicide in 1940) shows that the bulk of his output was concerned with the lives of pilots during World War I. He wrote the story that became the first Best Picture, Wings; he also wrote stories that became the aviation classic The Dawn Patrol and the Hemingwayesque The Last Flight, the latter about disaffected former pilots wasting away in Paris after the war.

Both this film and Eagle feature pilots who are preternaturally gifted in the art of killing, but that gift affects them differently. Fredric March, in Eagle, slowly turns into a drunken, depressed wreck because of his guilt over the people he's killing. Here, our protagonist is Rocky Thorne (Richard Dix), a pacifist sculptor goaded into joining the army when his fiancée denounces him as a coward. He ends up as a pilot and finds out that he's good at it, and before long he's a cocky, bloodthirsty killer, with no traces of the sensitive artist he was back home. Throughout his change from pacifist sculptor to killer, one thing doesn't change. Whether he's heaping scorn on the "lemmings" who rush off to war after the United States enters the First World War, or whether he's heaping scorn on people who question his insatiable desire to shoot down enemy planes, Dix's Rocky is a cocky, cold, unlikeable fellow. That's one of the film's flaws: it needs us on his side, so we are upset when he changes so dramatically, but with Dix's performance, it's easy to trace his later savagery back to his basic scorn for other people.

The two films feature several similar events and plot trajectories. Here, Dix shoots down a German plane on a humanitarian mission, which is mirrored in Eagle when Cary Grant shoots and kills parachuting German pilots: both are violations of the "etiquette" of war, etiquette that both men reject. Both films have their antiheroes go on leave to Paris where they meet wise women; both films have pilots driven to suicide; both have important scenes in which the main character judges the worth of his medals. The differences between them, though, are striking, and most of them have to do with subtlety. This film is too prone to speeches: the characters state the film's theses like they're reading off a list of talking points. Both films are cautionary tales about the rising threat of war in Europe, but Eagle did it without having a character exclaim, like Rocky does, "Ah, it's a grand war. I only hope the next one is half as good." Late in the film, he's forced to tell Nancy "You did me a great favor that day in the studio... Why, I might still be back there slaving, trying to express myself on some remote conception of art." We already understand that he's given up on all of his ideals; we don't need it stated so bluntly. I'm not sure where the dramatic difference in tone between this one and Eagle comes from. I don't know the work of either director or of any of the writers aside from Saunders, who also contributed to the screenplay of this film. Maybe that's a clue: maybe he was too enamored of his story to change the dialog into something that worked better on film.

Another area where it shows its inferiority to the earlier film is in the flight scenes. Most of the visual effects were done with models, and it took me a while to figure out what was utterly wrong about them: they move against an unchanging sky, which makes them seem unreal. One thing they did get right, though, were the spectacular crashes.

It does have a few brilliant moments. During the Paris scene, in an attempt to convince Nancy to let him use her sexually, Rocky throws her earlier recruitment speech back in her face: "This is no time for scruples, moral scruples. Everyone must make his sacrifice now. What are you in the face of the suffering of the world? How can you refuse whatever you have to give?" And during Rocky's first dogfight, when he can't bring himself to shoot at the Germans until one of them wounds him, there's an extraordinary image of his bloody fist tightening on the trigger. It's a film worth watching only for fans of the genre or the time period because its staginess and bullet-point delivery make it less complex and less rewarding than other antiwar films of the 1930s.

—April 30, 2006