Howard Hawks is known to have punctuated the titles of two films, Man's Favourite Sport? and Hatari!. But I have not found anyone who properly punctuates the title . . . Only Angels Have Wings. Those three dots before the words change the title significantly. "Only Angels Have Wings" by itself would be an assertion of the superiority of angel over man. But ". . . Only Angels Have Wings" is a different claim. It is the end of a sentence. From the imagery of the elements in that film one can deduce what the sentence as a whole would say: "Man and angel can fly, only angels have wings." To man, then, falls the advantage over the angel, the existential nobility of being able to fly despite his lack of wings. As this reading suggests the film contains a deal of Renaissance cosmology.
The four elements figure prominently in the images and language of the film. Most obvious is fire, as usual the big threat. McPherson fled one fire and in the action of this film survives another fire, is purged by yet another fire, to return to grac.e. The "fear" in "McPherson" is a response to the "Kill" in "Killgallon." Jeff was burned by Judy and reacts by a palpable chill towards the women he has to do with now. In both the professional life and the personal life, then, the danger of taking wing is presented in terms of fire. Jeff burns himself twice in Bonnie's domestic scene and is then shot by her. "I thought you never got burned twice in the same spot," is her quip; Hawks has a different point to the saw - shy at the first burn, the second burn is a necessary restorative. Jeff's constant play with matches and cigarettes continues the motif of playing with fire, while expressing Jeff's casualness:
Bonnie: Still carrying the torch?
Jeff: Got a match?
The common fire theme undercuts his pretense to casualness; Bonnie, of course, proves to be his match. His constant need for others' matches - his first contact with Bonnie is to light off her cigarette - expresses his cool manner towards others but also his dependence upon them. But when McPherson has the cigarette. Jeff has the match: Jeff flares a match to break the Kid's trance at seeing the man who left his brother to die. The matches here relate Jeff to John Wayne's Chance in Rio Bravo, the man who thinks he is independent but depends on others in his community. The social ritual of sharing and lighting each other's cigarette is a small cycle of human ritual in the face of death, a point of social community, and a domestication of the larger dangers. Kid's occasional sidekick and replacement is named Sparky.
The water in the film shares the purgative function of fire/danger. So Jeff douses himself to sharpen his senses for the last-minute flight and douses Judy to sober her up to her responsibilities to her husband, 'Bat. The planes themselves splash through water in their take-offs.
The basic elemental theme is the opposition of air and earth. Here the punctuation of the title finds its function. The earth represents man's ordinary, basic level of existence. So Bonnie is glad to get off the boat and glad to find an American earth-meal, steak, in the first scenes of the film. As she walks to Dutchy's with Joe and Les she passes through a market abustle with animal life. Significantly the animals are ground-bound birds, geese, chickens, the kind of life picked up by the statues on Dutchy's store counter. The birds are ground-bound in the first part of the film, but condors at the end. They define the continuity of earth and air.
Tex, at the watch station half-way up the mountain, confirms this continuity. His name and burro give him the cowboy identity, association with the myths of the earth, but he serves the profession of the sky. So, too, the longhorn emblem on his jacket looks like wings, defining him as a creature of both land and air. The same point lies in Jeff's quip over Joe's steak: "What do you want me to do. have it stuffed?" The stuffing proposes a continuity between steak and bird.
Hawks's vision of man in this film is of a creature born of the earth but aimed at the heavens. The central hero is thus a carrier named Jeff Carter whose heroism lies in the courage and strength by which he himself probes the skies and helps his fellow earth creatures rejuvenate themselves through and for flight. So the supreme punishment is "grounding." In this movie not all birds fly. The Kid for his physical disability; Judy for her failure to support Bat; Bonnie for her shortage of knowledge; Gent for his lack of bravery; Joe for his lack of discretion - these are all punished by grounding, an inability or exclusion from flight. There is an ironic realization of Joe's line to Dutchy, quarreling with Les about the drink bill: "If you take his money I'll never set foot in here again." Even the flier must keep his balance, his feet on the ground; that is the discretion that is the better part of the flier's valour.
While some birds fly others' are bound to the earth - the geese and chickens of the marketplace. Angels and man can fly, only angels have wings, for man to escape his limitations is the nobility of which angels are deprived.
Of course, to take flight man must dig deep into his resources. So Killgallon is given the worst jobs to earn his place in the fraternity he let down. So in carrying the nitro he is given a scene in which he has a burden to unload. And in his difficult take-off with the sick boy we have an image of a man sinking in order to climb.
Finally, Hawks's film is about another paradox in the human condition, man's delicate balance between community and personal isolation. The island and Tex's outpost are images of isolates craving connection. So the mail must go through. The individual characters need connection too, so Bonnie is thrilled to find the American boys, the Kid clings to his job to remain in the camaraderie that flouts mortality, and even the burro Napoleon is brought in from the cold to share the lonely shack. Jeff and Dutchy wear bluff fronts to belie their need for others. A minor convention of the airplane genre is the radio voice, a bodiless presence, a human contact across the separation. The radio voice is a dramatic point in all the flights in the film, particularly the fatal blind landing by Joe. Similarly, when the Kid and Killgallon fly together the Kid leans away from Killgallon, together but apart. Their connection comes only after the Kid has died, through Jeff buying Killgallon a drink.
Man was born alone but can rise to community, can rise to interdependence. So the individual skills, even the individual motives for flying, gather in the common purpose of saving the mail contract to Dutchy. After all. the community has the ships and radio for outside contact; the mail is not that important. Rather the mail contract is an excuse for the men to rally behind Dutchy and to prove themselves, to stretch the human limit. It is by that communal will that the cripples. Jeff and Les with complementary broken wings, finally save the day. So the Kid suppresses his hatred to fly with Bat Killgalton. Happily, the plane's altometer reads "Consolidated." So too, Jeff Carter has the illusion of independence that Hawks's John Wayne had in Red River and Rio Bravo. "I wouldn't ask any woman to do anything," Bonnie hears him say and Judy remembers him saying. At the end, through the silent language of Kid's two-headed coin. Jeff finally asks Bonnie to stay.
Angels, of course, don't have to talk to each other. They have an intuitive understanding that transcends the problems of language, even of sex. And so they are deprived, too, of the poetry and love-tension that gives man his magic in Howard Hawks's work.
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