Review of The Eagle and the Hawk

At first sight this appears as a very typical film about WWI aviation heroes, almost a copycat of The Dawn Patrol which had been shot a few years earlier. In a way it is - in another it is not. Themes are indeed close in those two films, which take place in almost identical surroundings - a sort of primitive countryside hotel-looking house in which an air squadron quarters, with an atmosphere mixing devil-may-care heroism and hidden doubts and fears, compulsory mirth and tragical losses of ever younger lives. So far, so similar. The Eagle and the Hawk is one of a kind, however. It starts with his two main characters, which all along the story share a strong antipathy for each other, and contrary to logical expectations never come to reconcile themselves before one of them dies. That would have been logical because this is far from a classical good guy / bad guy pattern. Or more precisely Crocker, the (rather) bad guy, while not being good in any usual meaning of the term, and certainly not a pleasant character as to how he thinks, speaks and acts, is very far from being unequivocally bad either. First he is surprisingly played by Cary Grant, later on in his career mostly Mr-Nice-Guy - but then he was still not a big star, and curiously he was frequently cast as some tough guy at ease in the rough-and-tumble, so why not; as well as why not casting Fredric March as the hero, which he was frequently playing in that period, though at a later stage he was frequently cast in grouchy or dark characters. Second Crocker is actually as heroic and as good a fighter as Young, and he is not haunted as him by potentially inhibiting question marks about the justifications of war and its cost in young lives. And third there is Crocker's final heroic gesture, all the more heroic as it excludes that anyone will ever learn about how heroic it was. Why does he do it? He has no debt to repay towards Young who never liked him or did anything for him. Nor is it clear that this is just a sort of flag-waving gesture so that Young's legend can live on whereas knowledge about his death could ruin his exemplary character - while probably a secret admirer of Young Crocker never has expressed any visible desire to set himself as an example. Perhaps he just dislikes the idea of Young losing a heroic image which he has fully deserved. Or perhaps he hates the idea of Young being summed up by a moment of weakness. If this is the case he has probably misread Young, whose gesture was possibly not a passing weakness - possibly more a defining moment of who he was deeply, which was certainly not the hero whose image had been constructed by others - and in this case Crocker's gesture betrayed Young's intentions. One cannot know for sure but in any case this is not a simplistic film, as it is rather hard to decide whether it is made in praise of heroism or anti-war pacifism - most other viewers concluded the film is just anti-war but it is possibly both, as contradictory as it may seem. March and Grant are both very good, though March justifiably gets the highest marks as the troubled central character. And what about Carole Lombard, whose enigmatic character, not named or defined in any other way than the Beautiful Lady, appears late in the film and very briefly - not for more than for a few minutes and a few laconic replicas? Her almost surreal apparition is as a magical suspension of time, a brief enchanted moment of respite in the tragical course of the story. She almost could be some sort of fairy though she is not, just a healer - "I want to be kind" she just says. It helps that the director(s) and the cinematographer seem to be as entranced by her beauty as Young is, filming her listening to him silently in loving close shots, not often seen since the era of silent movies ended. As with a terminally ill person she has not in her power to save him - the only thing she can offer is a moment of grace and peace, allowing him to unload in her ears, like some sort of priest or psychoanalyst, the poison which has invaded his heart. It is not much and it is the biggest gift she can give him. A very beautiful lady indeed, in a quite uncommon film.