Next up, still at #122, is a 1939 Howard Hawks movie starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur (with Rita Hayworth also appearing in her first major role) about… mail pilots. Yes, that’s right, in a movie made right before WW2 started and movie pilots all became soldiers, they found bravery and daring in guys who flew the mail over the mountains from a fictional South American port town.

I know nothing about early aviation, but if this movie is accurate, it was ridiculously dangerous — they have multiple pilots die in the course of this movie, and Cary Grant offhandedly mentions two others who’ve died in the last three months. That’s like one pilot a month just to deliver mail.

Well, mostly mail: There’s also one totally bonkers scene where they decide to fly nitroglycerin over the mountains. When the weather proves too rough to make this practical, they decide to (literally) kill two birds with one stone by dumping the explosives out of the plane onto a condor nest (which they want to destroy because the birds of course fly into the planes and can cause problems, plus also they hadn’t invented environmentalism yet).

(They also apparently hadn’t invented cosmopolitanism, because the intro to Jean Arthur’s character is her being thrilled to find Americans who speak English, because she’s tired of that “pig latin” that everyone’s been speaking, a statement that everyone just accepts as a totally normal thing that a person might say. Later, she’s thrilled to get a “good American steak” instead of, y’know, that famously terrible Latin American food; admittedly, I could accept “homesick for one’s familiar cuisine” more easily if it weren’t for the pig latin comment.)

But so the movie has two intertwined plot lines to it: One about whether Grant and his stable of pilots can get the mail delivered on time (the existence of their mail pilot company is apparently depending on fulfilling the last few deliveries of a year-long contract on time — at one point they actually say “just one last delivery to make” and spoiler alert about how that one doesn’t go as easily as you might imagine), and the other about whether the two leads can have a relationship together.

The relationship plotline is, I think, basically fine but unexciting. They’ve got some good lines with each other, and the relationship works in a movie-romance way, but it doesn’t stand out — Hawks and Grant’s later teamups (His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby) both have more interesting relationships in them. Fundamentally, I think that’s because Jean Arthur’s character doesn’t have much interesting going on: She falls for Cary Grant almost immediately, and doesn’t really budge off that for the length of the whole movie (which takes place over a week or so), so is mostly angsting about whether he likes her back. He meanwhile has stoic-dude difficulty expressing that he might ever need or be interested in a woman, and by the end gets up to the place where he’s able to say it elliptically and with a prop, which isn’t the most fascinating evolution.

But the action is genuinely incredible. This is 1939, which is a few years before CGI became practical, but they have some amazing aerial scenes done with a combination of models (which are more realistic than I would have expected, all things considered), interior cockpit sets, and actual live-action flight footage (apparently much beloved by early-aviation nerds). It mostly achieves the goal of special effects, which is feeling realistic enough that you don’t think about it from a craft perspective until afterward.

Despite those amazing effects, this is another movie that goes down into the “pretty good, but people really put this in their personal top ten lists?!?” bucket for me. From reading reviews, I know there are people out there who will go to bat for this as an absolute all-time great, but even after reading their takes, it feels like a thin basis to like a movie that much. But it’s an enjoyable fast-paced action romance with some charismatic stars, so recommended to anyone looking for an amiably chill evening movie.