The Lost Squadron (1932)

Much of the enjoyment to be derived from The Lost Squadron is due to its lampoon of a then up-and-coming Hollywood stereotype: the nutty aviation flick director. A type originated by pipe-smoking World War pilot William A. Wellman during the production of Wings (1927), it wasn’t long before young Howard Hughes came into the fold to give the world a second example by shoveling money into the Hell’s Angels incinerator, and the rest is cinematic history. The mold had set by 1931, when the rights to a serial fictionalizing the life’s work of seasoned stunt pilot Dick Grace (who of course had worked on Wings) were sold to RKO. One of the main characters was directorial autocrat Arthur von Furst, whose cruel, draconian armor ended up fittingly worn by none other than Erich von Stroheim.

Grace—who had been crashing planes in Hollywood for a decade—was briefly set to star in his own story as ‘Gibby’, but the reins were handed instead to period-piece stoic Richard Dix, fresh off the success of Cimarron (1931). Grace was relegated to his usual position on the picture as a stunt flyer, and Mary Astor, who had just suffered the graphically real loss of husband Kenneth Hawks in a freak plane crash, was curiously cast as Gibby’s screen-hungry girlfriend, Follette Marsh. Joel McCrea, pre-Code heavyweight Hugh Herbert, Robert Armstrong, and Dorothy Jordan round out the rest of the film’s principal cast, and with the exception of McCrea, are underutilized and aren’t given much personality or meaningful screen time.

The story is eye-rollingly larger-than-life, which is forgivable when considering its origins, and a touch meandering; it follows the brotherly exploits of a gaggle of World War aces who discover the movies as a meal ticket out of homelessness after finding one of their own, Woody (Robert Armstrong) hitting it big at the premiere of Arthur von Furst’s Sky Heroes. The overhead shots of the glitz and neon at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre are an obvious reference to the excess of Hell’s Angels, which boasted one of the most indulgent premieres to date at the time of filming. Complicating the situation is the female lead of Sky Heroes, Follette Marsh, who just so happens to be Gibby’s oldest, hottest flame—and who’s taken Furst’s right arm in order to further her film career.

Nevertheless, Gibby and Co. still decide to go to work on stunts for von Furst’s next film, but the director’s irate jealousy quickly melts the on-set tension into real danger. Von Stroheim’s spirited display of accented barking is thoroughly entertaining, as he always is when he’s front of the camera; not only does his von Furst delight in verbally torturing his cast, crew, and Follette (whose believability on the part of Mary Astor is admirable), he takes sadistic glee in the possibility of killing his charges through their own stunts. Gibby, meanwhile, finds a rebound in ‘The Pest’ (Dorothy Jordan), Woody’s wholesome kid sister, but ends up no match against the rugged Red (Joel McCrea) for her affections.

Von Furst decides to turn the evil up to eleven by dousing the control wires to Gibby’s plane in acid, but his plan goes fatally awry when Woody takes over and plummets hopelessly to Earth in an explosive, beautifully staged spiral. The rest of the gang have their way with the tyrant noirishly, tying him up in a shadowy room and threatening him with death if he doesn’t own up to his dastardly deed. Not so easily cowed, von Furst is shot and killed by Red while making a run for it, and his body gets propped up Weekend at Bernie’s style to answer for a curious copper who’s turned the corner to check on the commotion.

The film ends on a high note: Gibby takes von Furst’s corpse into the cockpit and crashes the plane into the ground nose first to hide his cause of death and exonerate Red, though the camera is shy and doesn’t allow us a good look at the plane’s occupants. As much as the PCA would have finger-wagged the visuals, The Lost Squadron would have been elevated a notch had there been less dawdling around the group’s impromptu interrogation of von Furst and more of Gibby’s death flight with him in tow. While the conclusion benefits from exhilarating aerial photography, it feels like we’re being rushed through the exit doors to the possibility of a Joel McCrea-Dorothy Jordan romance with a rose garden and a white picket fence waiting on the other side. Evil is as evil does, and the audience is cheated out of a full exploration of Gibby’s payback in order to make sure they left the theater feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Instead, we’re shown Woody and Gibby cornily parting the clouds with their phantom biplanes on their way to Heaven, albeit creatively depicted in ghostly negative film.

The romantically slighted flyer type embodied by Richard Dix in The Lost Squadron is all but outdone by Richard Barthelmess in William A. Wellman’s Central Airport (1933), another aviation drama with a triangular affair where the lead loses his girl to his best friend—and which naturally fares better by virtue of having said nutty aviation director at its helm as opposed to the comparatively pedestrian George Archainbaud. While Dix’s reliably stolid masculinity is put to good use here, he lacks a certain gallant virility that is more readily spied on Joel McCrea’s Red, which ultimately works to his advantage in Gibby losing not one, but two girls to other men, and sets the audience up to care more about his sacrifice for Red than Gibby himself. Added to Dix’s rap sheet are his short and sparing love scenes with Mary Astor, which are impossibly wooden and seem better suited to an Abraham Lincoln biopic. The film makes an unintentional comment on how quickly the pioneering Dix strain of theatrical ruggedness was losing steam with young American women by 1932, leaving a void to soon be filled by the more natural, understated styles of Joel McCrea, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper.

The Lost Squadron is better than it could have been without the interference of David O. Selznick, whose inaugural motion as an executive producer at RKO was pumping extra funds into the film, and he’s to be lauded for his hand in allocating some of those dollars towards Erich von Stroheim being blasted into the ground at a hundred miles per hour.