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).
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