Hell's Angels (1930)
Two brothers attending Oxford enlist with the RAF when World War I breaks out. Roy and Monte Rutledge have very different personalities. Monte is a freewheeling womanizer, even with his brother's girlfriend Helen. He also proves to have a yellow streak when it comes to his Night Patrol duties. Roy is made of strong moral fiber and attempts to keep his brother in line. Both volunteer for an extremely risky two man bombing mission for different reasons. Monte wants to lose his cowardly reputation and Roy seeks to protect his brother. Their assignment to knock out a strategic German munitions facility is a booming success, but with a squadron of fighters bearing down on them afterwards, escape seems unlikely.
Thrilling battle scenes... a timeless love story.
Helen: Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?
Santa Paula Canyon, Santa Paula, California, USA
(German bomber crash scene)
Oakland, California, USA
Iverson Ranch - 1 Iverson Lane, Chatsworth, Los Angeles, California, USA
(Airplane crash scene)
Glendale Grand Central Air Terminal - Grandview Avenue, Glendale, California, USA
Hollywood Center Studios - 1040 N. Las Palmas Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA
Stunt pilots refused to perform an aerial sequence that director Howard Hughes wanted. Hughes, a noted aviator himself, did his own flying. He got the shot, but he also crashed the plane.
More than 70 pilots were used in the film. Three of them died during shooting.
An eight-minute two-strip multi-color sequence remains the only surviving color footage of its star Jean Harlow.
The entire movie had been filmed as a silent, minus a soundtrack, by Howard Hughes in 1928. Greta Nissen had the role played later by Jean Harlow. When sound equipment became available, Hughes decided to re-shoot the whole film as a talkie.
This movie cost $3.95 million to make (equivalent to approximately $58 million in 2017), so expensive that it made no profit on its first release.
Continuity
Right after the intermission, a motorcyclist splashes mud on two British officers. The taller officer (on the right) has no mud on his face after being splashed in the long shot, but has a line of mud from his nose to his left ear in the subsequent medium shot.
At her apartment, Helen gives Monte a drink. He takes it in his right hand, in close-up he drinks with the glass in his left hand, then the angle changes and he is drinking with the glass in his right hand.
When the German pursuit squadron takes off before the captured German bomber makes its run, there are about two dozen planes in the formation. Later scenes filmed in the air show only about a dozen planes in the formation. This flip-flop in numbers continues throughout the attack on the bomber and the dogfight with the British pursuits.
Factual errors
At the start of the film in the German beer garden: A customer and a waitress indicate with their hands the number four by holding up four fingers, but in Germany the thumb is used as the first digit so they should really have used the thumb and three fingers.
When the German pursuit planes are attacking the bomber, the pattern of bullet hits on the bomber's engine nacelle and the tail are patterned too close together for a one plane shooting at another at a high rate of speed.