Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. Last week: Top Gun: Maverick presents a story about the fraught business of telling young aviators they have to go on missions where they might die, presented with state of the art technique and killer aerial photography. You can find examples of exactly the same thing as early as the silent era, but we won't be going back quite that far.

There is, I think, an argument to be made, and I don't think it's actually a very hard argument to make, that Howard Hawks was the director in the entire history of Hollywood filmmaking with the most finely-tuned sense of how the delivery of dialogue - not the words themselves, but the timbre and tempo of the actors' voices, and how they are overlaid with each other - worked to guide a viewer into and through the film. In that respect, his ninth feature, 1930's The Dawn Patrol, (later retitled Flight Commander, to distinguish it from its own 1938 remake), holds a very special and important place in the Hawks filmography: it is his oldest talking picture that still exists (his seventh feature, 1928's The Air Circus, was a part-talkie, and is lost; his eight feature, 1929's Trent's Last Case, was released in both silent and part-talkie versions, but only an incomplete print remains, and I believe it's an incomplete copy of the silent version). So it is, accordingly, the oldest example we have of Hawks's explorations of how dialogue can shape our response to a film.

The results are pretty conclusive: The Dawn Patrol isn't one of the great masterpieces of early sound, but it's definitely using dialogue in a surprising, even radical way (Hawks had to fight the studio heads at First National Pictures to get it how he wanted), and that's directly related to the queasy emotional experience it generates overall. The film is set during World War I, as it was not yet known, and it's based on the direct experience of Hawks and writer John Monk Saunders, who won an Academy Award for the film's story (both men disputed the other's claim to authorship), who both served as flight instructors for the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army during the war. It's a bleak, even nihilistic anti-war character study, built largely around three men who all have a different perspective on the pointless expenditure of young lives in the deadly aerial fighting of the first war with a significant use of air force. Major Brand (Neil Hamilton), head of a Royal Flying Corps squadron, fights almost non-stop with his superiors, begging them to stop throwing pilots who've just arrived on the front right into combat with almost no training, in the dwindling number of falling-apart planes in the squadron's possession. The two most senior fliers under his command, Dick Courtney (Richard Barthelmess) and Douglas "Scotty" Scott (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), have no idea that he's sick to his soul at the senseless waste of life he's personally responsible for overseeing, and just view him as the nearest incarnation of an uncaring military bureaucracy that thinks nothing of chewing up young men by the dozens, all to maintain a dubious superiority in an unwinnable war. Which is more or less exactly what he is, no matter how guilty he feels about it.

For that is the basic notion of The Dawn Patrol: it is possible to extremely, crushingly aware of the senselessness of a military strategy that results only in needless death, and also to be incapable of doing anything to alter or even delay that strategy. At a certain point, Brand is called back, leaving Courtney in charge of the squadron, and this is where the film goes from sober-minded anti-war picture to positively nauseating portrayal of moral helplessness, as Courtney discovers he must himself start chucking young men into the meat grinder, and Scotty certainly isn't going to remain his friend long once that starts happening.

Now, even in the fecund period between the arrival of sound and the shoring-up of the Hays Code in 1934, when Hollywood was indulging in daring pessimism that wouldn't be seen again in mainstream American filmmaking until the 1970s, nobody was going around make pitch-black stories about nihilistic despair in the face of death, so I don't want to oversell how bleak The Dawn Patrol is. But by the same token, it's a rough, bitterly straightforward and honest film, something that both Hawks and Saunders cared about very much. The studio wanted something more florid and melodramatic, and Hawks pushed back against this very hard, which brings us back to the matter of dialogue. It's only "realistic" up to a point, but it's striking, especially in the context of how dialogue was showing up in films in 1930, how spare and lean the writing is. These aren't overarticulate characters, and they don't tend to say more than the bare minimum to put across whatever it is that they're thinking in a given moment; this isn't a film of speeches, and it's not a film besotted with the idea that hearing people talk was in and of itself an incredible feat (to be fair, the novelty aspect of sync sound was fading by 1930, but it wasn't gone). It's a film of people crisply snapping off individual sentences.

And so we get those three lead performances, all of them relating to dialogue delivery in a different way. To be strictly honest, this doesn't seem entirely due to Hawks's stylistic intentions. Fairbanks's performance, in truth, simply isn't all that good; he's a little too robust and melodramatic, giving a performance that's perfectly adequate by the standards a lot of performances between 1928 and '30 need to be judged by: he's still figuring out how much emoting is the right amount, whether his voice needs to do all the work, how loud he can be. He's easily the weakest of the three main actors in The Dawn Patrol, but it never causes the film problems. Simply put, even though the film positions itself as the story of two comrades facing the war together, the main character is obviously and always Barthelmess's Courtney, and that actor is a wonderful fit for Hawks's experiment in vocal acting. I do not know if it's an oversight, a strategy, or if Hawks just didn't care that all three of his British main characters were played by actors with obvious American accents, but it works perfectly to have the New York-born Barthelmess deliver Courtney's lines with a blunt, cold lack of affect. Courtney is at the center of the film's conflicted, pessimistic feelings, and the actor draws that out in a number of ways, not just his speech: he keeps his face knotted up in a concerned grimace that makes it look like he spent the entire shoot with a sour stomach. There's an incredible moment of physical acting midway through the film where Courtney erases the names of some newly-dead fliers from a chalkboard in the squadron's headquarters, and rather than let the sadness of the moment make him limp and heavy, Barthelmess treats this scene by bunching up his shoulders and moving stiff and tense, making it clear that the character is dealing with this latest agony by reducing himself to a series of machine-like behaviors. Still, voice acting is a big part of what Barthelmess is up to, and his flat style brings a lot of anachronistic naturalism that works well in Hawks's overall stripped-down approach to this material.

For stripped-down The Dawn Patrol mostly is, at least when it's on the ground. For all that the director was obviously stimulated by sound recording, there's no hiding an early sound film. Indeed, I wonder if The Dawn Patrol isn't even slightly behind-the-curve in its locked-down camera and limited number of shot scales. Hawks was never a visually showy director, but this goes past "not showy" and into "just get the shot", and the presence of the terrific cinematographer Ernest Haller means that the shots are at least well-mounted. But outside of one incredible moment where several bright-eyed young faces are connected by a series of fast pans back and forth, as Courtney takes stock of whom amongst his worn-out squadron is the least battle-scarred, the visual storytelling here mostly doesn't extend past the expressions on Barthelmess and Hamilton's faces.

On the ground, that is. In the air, The Dawn Patrol is one of the god-damnedest air force movies of its generation. The film was rushed into production to take advantage of Howard Hughes's dementedly expensive Hell's Angels, beating that film into commercial release (though it premiered second). And while the Hughes film certainly has the sheer volume of spectacle to its credit (it cost around four times as much as The Dawn Patrol), I don't actually think it's as impressive a movie. Hawks, Haller, and editor Ray Curtiss had a better sense than the sprawling mess of the Hughes production of how to frame images and combine them in order to create a sense of the larger-than-life tension and violence of aerial combat, and the flying sequences in The Dawn Patrol remain nerve-wracking and evocative after nearly a century (they were good enough to enter the Warner Bros. stock library pool for a full decade, showing up in the 1938 Dawn Patrol among other places). Crucially, they're not exciting; the trick with any war film has always been to make combat seem draining and chaotic, not stimulating and action-packed, and this film does that incredibly well.

Besides the jarring images, it gets to that point largely through an extremely good sound track. It's to the film's disadvantage that it came out in the same calendar year as All Quiet on the Western Front, which invented the "war movie soundscape" so well that it would be basically an entire human lifetime before anything ever topped it, but The Dawn Patrol isn't too shabby on its own terms. Given Hawks's career-long interest in speech, it's not surprising how much of the war sounds here are worked into the rhythms of scenes, rather than just laid out as a cacophonous backdrop; characters are cut off by the sounds of explosions and bullets and forced to rush their words, or delay them, or shout over the noise. During the aerial fight sequences, this is exchanged for a more all-encompassing assault on our ears, a thick wall of menacing sounds of every pitch and description, covering up everything with the roar of combat and primitive flight.

All in all, quite a terrific achievement, and in any other career, it would be a highlight. For Hawks, it's only the third-best film about airplanes he made in the 1930s. And accordingly, The Dawn Patrol has been somewhat overlooked down the years (no doubt aided by the remake, and its subsequent re-titling). I'm not going to tell you that it's a lost masterpiece; this is a director with a truly daunting number of all-timers, and The Dawn Patrol is merely a damned impressive example of an early sound film that's testing the limits of what it can do technically, stylistically, and with genre (as opposed to All Quiet on the Western Front, which tests those limits and then blows them apart). It's still one of the best WWI films from the early sound era I've ever seen, and a suitably troubling and morally conflicted entry to the halls of anti-war cinema.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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