Wings in the Dark

Producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. borrowed Myrna Loy from MGM for a loan out film at Paramount and teamed her for the first time with Cary Grant who was under contract there. This must have been a courtship film of sorts because the following year Hornblow married Myrna Loy. I'm betting that top billing went to Loy because of Louis B. Mayer as a condition of the loan out and because Hornblow was courting her hot and heavy.

In the Forties Cary and Myrna did The Bachelor And The Bobby Soxer and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, both films more of the usual sort of material for both of them. Wings In The Dark is a drama about an Amelia Earhart type aviatrix and an aeronautical inventor who find love and happiness. But it's a bumpy road to all that.

Grant is a cynical fellow who despises Loy as a circus stunt flier with no feel for the progress of aviation. Myrna properly puts him in his place when she points out that due to the status of women at the time, her kind of flying is all that's open to her and in doing what she does she is showing her sex as capable as the male. A very far reaching treatise on feminism for its time.

During an accident Cary goes blind and he's not one to take charity. But as it were he happened to be working on developing instrument flying through thick clouds and fog and in the end he gives his machine the ultimate test.

Wings In The Dark is dated because aviation has made light years more progress than when this film was made. And it does pale beside the two classic screen comedies that Grant and Loy later did. Still it does offer an interesting glimpse of both stars in their earlier year and for Grant an unusual bit of casting.