Frank Capra's first full sound film doesn't have sound anymore, so looking at his second sound film, Flight, shows a technician doing everything he can to take advantage of the new sound while filming a lot outside, challenging himself by pushing against the limits of the contemporaneous technology, and yet it's all in service to a story so thin spread out over one hundred and ten minutes that nothing really connects. If this had come in at a more reasonable 80 minutes instead of 110, I think it could have worked a lot better, however at its extended runtime, it's just much more boring than it should have been.
Lefty Phelps (Ralph Graves) has to live down an embarrassing moment in his college football career when he got mixed up and ran the ball the wrong way down the field to lose the game, an event witnessed by Marine Corps pilot Panama Williams (Jack Holt) who encourages him to join the Marines to gain some purpose in life. The whole subplot of Lefty living down the reputation is kind of odd, especially since news of it only spreads amongst the recruits because he keeps a clipping of the event on him at all times, a clipping that falls out of his pocket and gets picked up by someone who makes fun of him because of the reminder. It's also supposed to feed into this idea at the core of Lefty as a character that he's afraid of trying again, limited by a fear that makes him screw up in similar ways, like when he can't get his aircraft to lift off the ground at his graduation test.
The actual dramatic meat of the film ends up being a little love triangle between Lefty, Panama, and the nurse Elinor (Lila Lee). Panama is really consumed with her though she is only really polite in return. She becomes enamored of the young, more handsome Lefty, but Lefty is too loyal to Panama for helping him out of his funk and bringing him along on the later stage mission to Nicaragua as his mechanic to go selfish regarding his own desires towards Elinor.
And that's kind of it. It's a very simple love triangle that takes a while to develop over the film, doesn't have a whole lot of dimension to it, but is earnestly told with a couple of nice little mechanical twists to it (like Panama getting Lefty as his mechanic). For a short melodrama it might have been enough, but this is a nearly two hour film.
The final bit is dominated by this sudden, underdeveloped need for the Marines to use airplanes against bandits in Nicaragua against a bandit named Lobo (Jimmy De La Cruze). It's handled with some quick dialogue that he's attacked some Americans there, the actual battle is a technically competent execution of capturing action in flight while the actual stakes are thin and hardly ever explained in anything other than the broadest of detail. There's a bit where Lefty ends up behind enemy lines that very closely mirrors the similar third act mechanics of Submarine with the slight benefit of Panama sacrificing one other soldier other than Lefty than a submarine full of them, combined with the fact that we know that Lefty is the only one left alive from the crash (something Panama doesn't know). The pique is, of course, sourced from the love triangle dynamics, and it sort of works in this melodramatic context, but only sort of.
The sound design, since its so early in the sound era and fascinates me, is this curious mixture of experiments, some that work others that don't, of trying to make a soundscape pleasing to the audience. On the one hand, the opening football game has a surprising uniformity to the background, possibly executed by capturing a similar roar of cheers across all of the shots (it really does feel like this is still the moment when sound mixing hadn't been applied to film soundtracks yet). There is also this tendency to drop out all sound in between lines of dialogue on scenes filmed outside, so we get the ambiance of the field when someone says something, all sound drops out for a second, and then someone else speaks and that ambiance comes back. It's kind of weird, but Capra and his sound team was trying to make this whole sound thing work, at least.
So, I'd probably say that Submarine is the better of the two Howard Hawks-like films that Capra had made up to this point. Hawks made them better because he had a stronger sense of these types of characters and had a more interesting way to portray these women as strong and belonging in the world instead of waifishly sitting around while things happen around her. For a better look at airmen of the time, I'd recommend Hawks' version of The Dawn Patrol, but he was juggling these kinds of love triangles even in stuff like Tiger Shark.
Anyway, it was okay. Its story is fine, just not very meaty, and the spectacle is pretty good, if unsupported by much narrative. It's a middling little adventure and melodrama that has understandably been largely forgotten by everyone save Capra completists.
