DAWN PATROL Movie Review
1938 Edmund Goulding
It's a cliche in the restaurant business that the key to success is three things: location, location, location. In this remake of a 1930 film, the key is casting, casting, casting. Three actors in their youthful prime make Dawn Patrol a thoroughly enjoyable, if undemanding, aerial adventure.
The setting is France, 1915, where the Royal Flying Corps stages daily flights across enemy lines. Their biplanes are rickety crates held together with chicken wire and spit, and they're shot down so often that new replacements are sent up with virtually no training. Maj. Brand (Basil Rathbone) hates the way the war is being conducted. He'd rather be flying, but he has to play his part and so he delivers the unpopular orders. His best pilot, Capt. Courtney (Errol Flynn) detests him and is barely able to hide his contempt when the names of the dead are erased from the blackboard where missions are assigned, and new names of green pilots are chalked in. For the most part, though, Brand and his best friend Lt. Douglas Scott (David Niven) make the best of it. They hide their fear, have their first brandy of the day at 10 in the morning, and join in for a rousing chorus of their favorite drinking song, “Hurray for the Next Man That Dies!”
Writer John Monk Saunders makes the unsettled relationship of the three characters so interesting that the film is just as intense when it's on the ground as it is when the scene shifts to flying. Saunders, also responsible for the story of the original Wings, served in the Army Airs Corps. Even when the physical action is far-fetched—and some of it fetches about as far as it possibly can—the characters’ emotions ring true.
As for the flying scenes themselves, many were repeated from the 1930 version and some of the process special effects are much too obvious. (Though this film was made five years after King Kong, the effects don't even come close to that masterpiece. Saunders, by the way, was married to Fay Wray.) Those criticisms aside, two long aerial sequences, one in the middle and another at the conclusion, are imaginative and fast-paced. By the time they occur, we care enough about the characters that the effects’ shortcomings aren't too important.
Flynn, Niven, and Rathbone are simply superb. The conflicts they must resolve don't have any easy answers and the characters are engagingly flawed. In a way, Rathbone has the most to work with because Maj. Brand is more serious. Courtney and Scott can get by on good looks and easy charm, while he has to take care of the dramatic heavy lifting. They find able support in veteran character actor Donald Crisp, as Phipps, the adjutant. His rambling speech to Brand about an imaginary dog is a small gem. In that scene, the characters virtually cut a template for the roles that Nigel Bruce and Rathbone would create a year later when they played Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in Hound of the Baskervilles.
Cast: Errol Flynn (Capt. Courtney), David Niven (Lt. Douglas Scott), Basil Rathbone (Maj. Brand), Donald Crisp (Phipps), Barry Fitzgerald (Bott), Melville Cooper (Sgt. Watkins), Carl Esmond (Von Mueller), Peter Willes (Hollister), Morton Lowry (Donnie Scott), Michael Brooke (Capt. Squires), James Burke (Flaherty, the motorcycle driver), Stuart Hall (Bentham); Written by: Seton I. Miller, Dan Totheroh; Cinematography by: Gaetano Antonio “Tony” Gaudio; Music by: Max Steiner. Producer: United Artists, Warner Brothers. Running Time: 103 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta.