IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022054/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,9
Director: William Dieterle
Main Cast: Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown, Helen Chandler, Elliott Nugent
"The war is over but a new struggle begins for former World War I flyboys Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) and his three friends. They are all shell-shocked by their combat experiences and ill-fitted for a world of workaday responsibility. For them, the night life of Paris is an irresistible siren's call. Then comes the allure of Lisbon with its passion and bullfighting. Then may come the tragic result of the quartet's inability to rediscover the selves the war took from them.
This exceptional film is the work of writer John Monk Saunders and, more surprisingly, director William Dieterle. It's a penetrating, incisive work that manages to be both bleak and nihilistic without becoming pretentious or enervating. While a heavy sense of melancholy hangs over the film, tinged with an undercurrent of despair, Flight never becomes labored. Its characters are souls that are weighted down and, for most of them, on an inexorable march toward destruction, but their unconscious fascination with a Death Wish doesn't force the film to become an ordeal. Instead, one cares deeply about these people, mourns even as they reach their expected ends, and feels triumphant at the implied relative happiness that awaits those who manage to survive the dark nights of their own souls. Dieterle directs with extreme sensitivity and taste; it's far and away his best work and makes one wish he had created more works in a similar vein. The cast is all good, with special mention going to Helen Chandler's Nikki."
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