The Eagle and the Hawk

While not a remake, The Eagle and the Hawk treads ground similar to another John Monk Saunders story adaptation, Howard Hawks’s 1930 picture, The Dawn Patrol.

But where Hawks’s film focused on the burden of command, this story feels more reductive. Fredric March plays a pilot crumbling under the pressure of losing gunner after gunner even as he racks up enemy kills and medals. Cary Grant plays a fellow officer who resents March after March keeps him out of the pilot’s seat and thus, as Grant sees it, glory.

While it lacks The Dawn Patrol’s extensive aerial photography, it sports enough to convince. And the sound and cinematography prove superior to Hawks’s effort, thanks to technical advancements in the three-year gap. Consider the scene where March and his commander talk outside at night, cloaked in shadows discussing the reality of death. The technology for such a scene didn’t exist for Hawks’s film, which still relied on more primitive recording techniques, but allows The Eagle and the Hawk to visualize March’s character’s darkening worldview.

And March proves the film’s selling point. His performance shines. Consider how he conveys his journey from eager recruit to jaded cynic in a measured evolution, communicating volumes with just his eyes, which start bright and excited before morphing to dull and penetrating as the film progresses.

Grant has less to work with. The script paints him as something of a one-dimensional hothead, whose arc comes from a learned respect for March. A better film would have made him more three-dimensional, or at least proffered a rationale for his impetuous behavior. In Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend, Mark Glancy reports Grant only got the part after Gary Cooper dropped out, likely because of the lackluster role.

Even more wasted is Carole Lombard, who turns up in a throwaway role as a beautiful stranger March meets on leave. That director Stuart Walker couldn’t recognize the talent in Grant and Lombard, while giving excessive screen time to Jack Oakie’s ineffective comic relief demonstrates his uncertain grasp on the material.

Besides ill-conceived comedy, Walker also can’t seem to resist melodrama. March’s lone misstep comes during the finale’s banquet scene when he makes an impassioned speech about the futility of war. A stronger director (like Hawks) would have had March underplay the scene, but Walker was no Hawks and the speech tips into overwrought melodrama. This tendency also proves evident in the film’s melodramatic death scenes.

Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison. Hawks didn’t make melodramas, and this film’s differentiator from Hawks’s is its melodrama. Even still, one suspects a Michael Curtiz or Raoul Walsh would have handled things better.

Then there’s the ending. Upon reflection, the bittersweet finale contradicts the film’s entire anti-war message. It implies a “greater good” in March’s sacrifice that epitomizes exactly what March was railing against. By this point, we’re so invested in March’s performance, we buy it, but it doesn’t pack the same wallop as the finale in Hawks’s film.

Thus, while uneven, The Eagle and the Hawk showcases March at his best, and though it lacks the gut-punch resonance of Hawks’s more measured film, its melodramatic approach offers a cathartic alternative to Hawks’s more stoic view.