Saturday, July 12, 2025

Douglas Messerli | I'm Funny That Way: Two Fighting Flyer Films of 1929 [Introduction]

i’m funny that way: two fighting flyer films of 1929

by Douglas Messerli

 

Circling somewhere in a long string of films about early wartime fliers waiting to land before film audiences between William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927), The Flying Fleet (January 1929), the later Test Pilot (1938), is Frank Capra’s film Flight (September 1929) which shares much in common with the others, including the fact that the leads train and serve in or for the military together during which they become close buddies and proceed to fall in love with the same woman, resulting in a feeling of betrayal between the two males and a final reconciliation of the two airmen, one of whom saves or attempts to save the other at the last moment through his piloting skills. Most importantly, each of these films, although engaged in the narrative with heterosexual love is actually centered upon the male camaraderie between the two leads, a relationship which can be read as a coded homosexual love or, at the very least, a significantly important bromance which far overshadows the heterosexual marriage with which each of these films ends.

     What is also very interesting is the interrelationships between the last three named of these movies. The Flying Fleet, starring Roman Novarro as Tommy Winslow and Ralph Graves as Steve Randall was based on a story by the famed U.S. Navy Aviator Frank Wead, who also wrote the script to the Test Pilot starring Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Capra’s Flight, which film commentator Hal C. F. Astell has correctly noted is not only an obvious comparison with the earlier one of that year but “isn’t far off being exactly the same film.


      That second film, Flight is credited as being based on a story by Ralph Graves, the same actor of The Flying Fleet, and who stars in this film as “Lefty” Phelps, the pilot who wins the girl over his friend and close companion Gunnery Sergeant “Panama” Williams, a role performed by Jack Holt, who is often cited as the Clark Gable of the silent films. Wead also wrote the script for Capra’s film 1931 film Dirigible, yet another story of airmen who loved the same woman, starring once again Ralph Graves, this time with Jack Holt.

      Perhaps I should also mention that both Novarro and Graves, who shared the bill on The Flying Fleet, were quite openly gay to the Hollywood community. Murdered by two brothers who called from an agency Novarro regularly used to obtain male prostitutes, Novarro’s homosexuality is well known today.  During his career he had longer affairs, evidently, with composer Harry Partch (working as an usher at the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the time), journalist Herbert Howe, who became his publicist, and the wealthy San Francisco businessman, Noël Sullivan.

      Obviously Graves is lesser known, his sexuality seldom discussed. But he had long been a friend of Howard Hughes’ father, who had put Graves on the payroll of “Big Howard’s” Toolco company when he was between acting jobs. Later he and the younger Howard Hughes became good friends, and one of Hughes’ first film efforts was to be Grave’s directorial debut Swell Hogan of 1926, a disaster when Hughes finally screened it. Unsure of how to fix it, Hughes hired Dorothy Arzner to work on it, but she clearly thought it impossible to redeem. When Howard contacted his uncle, novelist and film director Rupert Hughes, according to biographer Darwin Porter (Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angels), he responded "It's nothing. No plot. No build up. No character development. The acting stinks. Destroy the film. If anybody sees it, you and that homo Graves will be the laughing stock of Hollywood.” In an interview with Anthony Slide for Silent Players, Graves later admitted to having had affairs with W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward, as well as Mack Sennett (no Mabel Normand around when he stayed in Sennett’s house) and Howard Hughes* while working on Swell Hogan, the film for which Hughes had workers destroy both the celluloid and the sets.

 

*Porter quotes Graves about Hughes: “His reputation is that he bedded a lot of the most beautiful gals in Hollywood. It’s also well known to a few hundred people in the industry that he also bedded a lot beautiful guys, too, including me. From the very beginning I knew Howard as a homo. I was a great friend of the boy’s father since I too as a Houstonian. Papa Hughes was definitely no fairy—I can swear by that. But he knew his son was a cocksucker.” But Porter’s book, beware, is self-described as a fiction.

      Whether everything Graves says can be believed is not for me to answer. He also claimed that when working with D. W. Griffith, the director would call him in to discuss a script, but spend most of the time kissing him.

      The Graves / Hughes movie, incidentally, was to tell the story of a homeless man who wanted to adopt a baby, almost crying out, it seems to me, that the gay writer would like to have children, homelessness in this case being used as a metaphor for living a life without a wife.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).


No comments:

Post a Comment

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

https://myqueercinema.blogspot.com/2023/12/former-index-to-world-cinema-review.html Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [For...