Post by rmichaelpyle on Jul 18, 2009 6:16:20 GMT -6
Watched "Sky Bride" (1932) with Richard Arlen, Jack Oakie, Virginia Bruce, Louise Closser Hale, Robert Coogan, Tom Douglas, Harold Goodwin, Charles Starrett, and, in a very early role, Randolph Scott. This one was about stunt flyers in the early barnstorming days, and about a buddy of Arlen's (Tom Douglas) who gets killed doing a very dangerous stunt with Arlen, both in separate planes. Arlen gets the gitters, feels guilty besides, and quits the flying, leaves, goes to an air company and works as a mechanic, silent about his past. Unbeknownst to him or the audience, Louise Closser Hale, not only living at the boarding house where all the air mechanics and pilots live, but the host, so to speak, is the mother of the man killed in the accident with Arlen. In the end all is resolved, of course, and Ginny Bruce and Dick Arlen are lovers. Of course. BUT...meanwhile...the airplane stunts in this film are as good as any I've ever seen. During the filming of "Sky Bride" (the name of Arlen's plane, by the way) one of the stunt pilots in the film, Leo Nomis, was killed at Metropolitan Airport in Los Angeles doing a spin for the film. The plot of this film is as stale and hackneyed as any one can find, but the stunt flying is all one could possibly ask for, indeed! I could have watched many, many more hours of what I saw here. And that leads me to another point. Wallace Reid was the most popular silent movie idol of all until he died in 1923 of withdrawal from morphine imposed upon him from an accident in Hollywood. His pictures were daredevil racing pictures and that sort of thing. They were the rage of early Hollywood. When Reid died, Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor were at wits end to find another replacement who could make the same kind of pictures Reid had made. One of the later 'replacements' was Richard Arlen. In many respects, this nine-years-after-the-death picture is a Wallace Reid substitute. It would have satisfied many of those ardent patrons of Reid who love pictures like this. I really liked the film, and I think it deserves a much bigger modern audience. It still thrills like it did then, that I can guarantee you!!
