Flight Into Darkness (1935) User Reviews

Litvak's unjustly ignored work

[dbdumonteil · 8/10 · 11 July 2005]

Anatole Litvak's work is huge:there are German,French and American productions in an uneven filmography.Most people know for sure "Anastasia" "snake pit" and the suspenseful "sorry wrong number".His "Mayerling" was superior to Terence Young's .The weakest works came at the end of his career:"nights of the generals" "aimez-vous Brahms" or le couteau dans la plaie" are dreadful stuff.

"L'equipage" belongs to his first French period.It has been wonderfully restored and the pictures are sometimes really stunning.Litvak takes a subject as old as the hills (a love triangle) and succeeds in grabing the viewer.It takes place during WW1 .Two pilots team up (the title means "the crew");one of them is his pal's wife's lover.

The score is lovely featuring Chopin and French old military songs like "auprès de ma blonde" .

Remarkable sequences: the soldiers leaving for the war ,on a train ;the stifling atmosphere of the honky-tonk where girls dance FRench cancan;and above all (no pun intended),all the scenes in the sky where Litvak uses the planes,the submachine guns and the clouds with great skill.The last scene when the clouds turn black as Aumont is dying is still impressive by today's standards.

Fine performances by Charles Vanel (the husband)and Jean-Pierre Aumont (the lover).Annabella (who would become Tyrone Power's wife ),even by today's canons is still photogenic which is not the case of many actresses of the thirties.

NB:Aumont and Annabella were reunited in Marcel Carne's "Hôtel du Nord" but that time,they were out-shadowed by the supporting cast,Arletty and Louis Jouvet.

Sometimes The Sky Really Can Be The Limit

[writers_reign · 8/10 · 4 January 2013]

My good friend dbdmonteil draws attention to the wide range of Anatole Litvak's directorial CV, which is indeed, impressive, but what he omits to say is that Litvak was also responsible for the dire Hollywood remake (in 1947) of the Prevert-Carne masterpiece Le Jour se leve which, with Henry Fonda (you're kidding, right) in the Jean Gabin role was re-titled The Long Night. Be that as it may Litvak does the business here all right. Working with a hackneyed plot - two fliers, buddies, close, but one is in love with the other's wife and she with him - Litvak transforms it into something of quality and very watchable. In Hollywood the two fliers would have been played by Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien who would wise-crack and one-liner their way to a happy ending; instead Litvak allows it to play out much more realistically and even tragically. Charles Vanel, one of the finest all-round actors in French cinema would go on to make a superior 'flying' picture in Jean Gremillon's La Ciel est a vous and here he leaves the other two corners of the eternal triangle - Jean-Pierre Aumont and Annabella - dead in the water. Three years later Aument and Annabella were the ostensible stars of Carne's Hotel du Nord but once again they were left for dead by Louis Jouvet and Arletty. Nevertheless this is a fine film and recommended.

"You share everything:The same joys,the same achievements,the same hard knocks."

[morrison-dylan-fan · 8/10 · 5 March 2019]

Gathering up the French DVD's I have waiting to be viewed last night,I decided to dive into the pile today. Taken by fellow IMDber dbdumonteil's very good review,I decided to fly into darkness.

View on the film:

Pre-dating by a decade the "buddies exchanging wisecracks whilst proudly serving for their country" genre that would become a staple of US cinema from WWII,co-writer/(with Joseph Kessel) director Anatole Litvak's adaptation of Kessel's own novel lands in WWI with the thick bond of friendship between Maury and Herbillon brightly burning, but brilliantly curls it into the melancholy,rather than the comedic. Welcoming the viewer to the partying and high-flying times of the squad, the writers gradually bring the love triangle laying under the surface between Helene and her husband Maury's bond with Herbillon onto the horizon, which darkens the sky on a richly melodrama final.

Gathered round the pubs of WWI singing army songs such as "auprès de ma blonde", director Litvak & Henri Georges-Clouzot's future regular cinematographer Armand Thirard soar into action with beautiful, ultra-stylised overlapping dissolves unlocking the heart of the love triangle, and sweeping the dissolves along the aftermath of the battlefields. Appearing to be a mix of real and studio shot, Litvak and Thirard give the sky fighting action scenes a real weight, via elegant wide-shots capturing the strategic alignment of the planes, matched by close-ups in the planes on the emotions running across the faces of the pilots. Holding a love for each other, Charles Vanel, Jean-Pierre Aumont and " Annabella" each give excellent performances as the the tangled loves, via Vanel digging into the big hearted, world weariness of Maury, Aumont keeping Herbillon aching to keep his romance and friendship beating, whilst Annabella has Helene strike an alluringly tragic nerve, as Helene looks to the sky, and sees the flight into darkness.

Superior to the Director's Hollywood Remake

[lchadbou-326-26592 · 7/10 · 8 February 2021]

For those able to do a side by side comparison between this original French production and the American version Litvak did a couple of years later when he was in the US, L'Equipage is the better of the two. For one thing it has ,about 80 minutes in, some of the best aviation photography outside of Only Angels Have Wings, Litvak simply borrowed some of it as well as the Honneger musical accompaniment for the remake. Charles Vanel has more warmth in the lead than Paul Muni, who seems like a stuffed shirt in comparison. Annabella has more tenderness than the somewhat hard edged and brittle Miriam Hopkins And handsome young Jean Pierre Aumont as the rival is more likeable than Louis Hayward The arrival at the front seems darker and more somber in the earlier version as well. An added detail for those who know French: Vanel and Aumont go back and forth between using the polite Vous (at first) to the more familiar Tu, and then later back to Vous again.