If any of you have seen John Ford's tribute biography to Spig Wead The Wings Of Eagles, you'll recall that Ward Bond plays a director modeled on Ford who is contacting former flier Wead to write a screenplay of an aviation film he's planning to do. For some reason Airmail has not been readily available for the public in years, but fortunately I did get to see a copy and now know what Ford and Wead were negotiating for.
Airmail stars Pat O'Brien and Ralph Bellamy as a hotshot pilot and the supervisor of an airport in the western USA. O'Brien curiously enough is playing the kind of role that James Cagney would have been cast in the many collaborations those two did at Warner Brothers where O'Brien would sign in the following year. Bellamy in turn is playing a typical Pat O'Brien role, the authority figure who has to take the wind out of Cagney's sails.
Airmail does live up to Spig Wead's hopes and dreams of a tribute to the men who flew these crates delivering the mail. As airplanes got better and safer mail delivery got to be taken for granted. But putting an airmail stamp on a letter meant in the early Thirties you were asking a pilot to risk his life so your loved ones could get news from you. The film was extremely timely as in 1932 the topic of air safety was a big one as news of pilot crashes of mail planes seemed to be occurring regularly.
O'Brien who has no hesitation in letting everyone know he's the best at what he does, starts an affair with Lillian Bond the unhappily married wife of fellow pilot Russell Hopton. This isn't a first for either O'Brien or Bond. Later on Hopton is killed, one among the many deaths in Airmail.
The climax has O'Brien flying a rescue mission for Bellamy who with a lack of pilots takes an Airmail plane up to deliver the mail what happens is for you to see Airmail, but it's along the lines of several Cagney/O'Brien films.
Speaking of which Cagney and O'Brien a few years later starred in the screen adaption of Spig Wead's Broadway play Ceiling Zero. That one is rather static owing to a bad cross over from stage to screen. Airmail is qualitatively better.
And while the special effects are ancient, the drama is real and contemporary. Try to see this rarely seen Ford feature when it's broadcast. It was strange to see O'Brien in a Cagney part, but he acquitted himself well.
