The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 11-17
Air Mail (1932)
Directed by John Ford
Ford is always poised on a knife’s edge between hilarity and tragedy, a punch-drunk margin walker, the Irish poet gazing at his adopted homeland in wonder and horror. Here he struts his hour on the wings of a plane barrel-rolling towards an abyss, laughing at the greedy toll man on the other side. Howard Hawks would later turn this story of perpetually revenant airmen into Only Angels Have Wings, but Ford keeps his focus narrow: Two men, two women, and death from above. Pat O’Brien and Ralph Bellamy (also later a Hawks subject) act off each other like Louie Bellson and Buddy Rich trading solos. They’ve got different styles and their attitudes about the plane as an instrument put them at each other’s throats. One thinks he’s invincible, the other knows he isn’t. Ford puts wry, snowy silence and women between them as they break up and remarry. Better to share the sky when men crack wise one minute and beg for mercy while they burn to death the next. You see death on a screen, you hear it on the radio in the control tower, and your powerless when it falls out of the sky and hits the guy next to you. Better to laugh in its face together than play its game apart. Scout Tafoya (May 15, 2:30pm; May 24, 7pm at MoMA’s “Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928–1937”)