As a boy of six or seven I saw a film, or so I believe, in which a dead fighter pilot returns in a ghostly form to the room of a comrade to remind his friend he was once flesh and blood and must not be forgotten. I tried for years to see this movie again; I went to every film that had anything to do with World War I, and I waited in the charged dark for the scene to play itself out, to tell me I had not dreamed it, but I never succeeded. Nor since movies have become available on cassettes have I been able to see that scene on a television screen. Did I ever see it? For years I thought I did, but now I don’t know. I may have dreamed it, for as a child my dreams were incredibly vivid and many, like this one, I had over and over. Furthermore this was for me a typical dream in that it involved the return of someone who’d died. No doubt this had something to do with the loss of my father, who died when I was five, and who I believed I’d failed, for in some mysterious way I still believed he was “present,” and if I went about it right I could see him again. I’d seen him in his coffin, I’d attended his funeral, I stood at the graveside with my mother, and yet a part of me went on believing he was somewhere on earth, “present” like the ghostly airman I’d seen on the screen or in a dream.
Thus on Saturday afternoon at the Avalon Theater on Detroit’s west side when I saw the coming attractions of The Dawn Patrol, due there within a week, I was more than usually excited. Early afternoons on Saturdays at the movies were the highlights of those weeks, but one featuring a WWI war-in-the-skies film was over the top. A week later my twin brother Eddie and I walked the ten blocks to the Avalon in a state bordering on frenzy. The week before we’d seen snatches of Errol Flynn’s dogfights with German planes, an unusually subdued Flynn except when he was in the cockpit of his flimsy cloth-and-wood Spad taking on the black fighter planes of Von Richter’s squadron while something called trench warfare, something deadlier and less spectacular, went on unobserved below. As Major Courtney, Flynn bore a slight resemblance to photographs of my father: both were tall, handsome, and wore mustaches as well as British uniforms, for my father had served as an officer in the British army in what came to be known as The Great War. I know that much of the excitement we felt that day had to do merely with the chance to see once again Flynn, who for us was the most handsome and “coolest” (though if that term existed in 1938 neither Eddie nor I knew it) presence in the universe.
Last week, watching a cassette of The Dawn Patrol, I was stunned by how much I recalled and how much I’d forgotten. The look of Flynn as Courtney and of his carefree, often drunken sidekick Scottie, played wonderfully by a boyish David Niven, I recalled, and of course their thrilling dogfights with the Germans. All these years later I still knew the plot, knew that Courtney would replace Brand, played by Basil Rathbone, as squadron commander and be obliged to send Scottie’s younger brother into combat and to his death, and that soon after, to make amends or just because of who he was, Courtney would trick Scottie into an interlude of drinking, and having talked Scottie into taking a nap, he would take his place on a suicide mission deep behind German lines and pay with his life. I had forgotten how gray the film was. Although the jacket of the cassette proclaims it’s “filmed in glorious black and white,” in fact there’s almost no white in the entire film. Most of the film takes place indoors within a few badly lighted rooms at squadron headquarters. These scenes are filled with talk, much of it less than believable, and within the first half hour I felt that the director, Edmund Goulding, must have wanted me to feel claustrophobic, to feel the same urge the pilots felt to escape these dim, confining rooms even if it meant risking their lives. I did feel an enormous relief when in the pre-dawn the men went out to their planes, and something like elation when at last they took off into an overcast sky streaked with the day’s first light.
Of my three hours and change in the Avalon I recall almost nothing. There had to be another feature—there always was—and the standard Saturday matinee fare of newsreel, serial, coming attractions, and cartoon. I remember none of that, nor do I recall any horsing around that Eddie and I did, but then we behaved badly only when the movie bored us. Did I sit in charged expectation of the appearance of the “ghost pilot” of an earlier film or of my dreams? I’m sure I did. I’m also certain I accepted the film’s overt theme, for it’s stated over and over by Courtney, Brand, and later Scottie: the senselessness of war, this war and all others. The film is an extended lamentation for the waste of young lives, and no one on screen sees any purpose in the war, nor is a single patriotic spiel uttered. When a captured German pilot is brought to headquarters, he behaves like a good-natured buffoon, and in his drunkenness he behaves—except for a complement of “German manners”—exactly like his captors. He takes a special shine to Courtney, who shot down his plane, and insists on singing with him. Clearly the British pilots are motivated by the need to put up a good show and survive, and above all by their loyalty to each other. Their enemy is faceless, and we never see him: he phones from some mythical higher headquarters and day after day orders the squadron into battles in which the “replacements”—kids of eighteen with a dozen or so hours of flight training—are invariably slaughtered. No matter how passionately Brand and Courtney beg for a few days in which to train these boys in the tactics of warfare, they are denied, and the next day’s dawn patrol claims more boys who had no chance against the better equipped and more experienced Germans. Seeing it this time I was struck by the notion that both the director and the screenwriter were seeing the movie through the prism of Wilfred Owen’s poetry. It’s almost as though the telephone voice is that of Owen’s “Field Marshall God,” with his unquenchable thirst for young blood.
The strongest themes are unspoken, for all the exciting and expansive moments of the film are devoted to the glory of flight and the romance of these thrilling competitions in which skill, courage, and experience determine the winner. We’re told that the British equipment is inferior, but when Court-ney and Scottie take on the enemy in one-on-one combat, they almost invariably win. This is war fought by gentlemen, knights of the air who kill without rancor or disgust. I was reminded of the opening lines of Baudelaire’s poem “L’Héautontimorouménos”: “Je te frapperia sans colère / Et sans haine…(“I shall strike you without anger / And without hatred…”). When I saw the film in 1938, one war was raging in Spain and “we” were losing; a larger one was waiting to engulf the world, one that might need my blood.
How much of this did I get at age ten? Without trying to sound brighter than I am or was, I’d guess I got almost all. The film is not that subtle. As a kid not immediately faced with armed combat, I was free to luxuriate in the drama of brave men in a fair fight to the death, and as a shrewd city kid I knew all that was horseshit. Curiously, what I remember most clearly from that distant afternoon, even more clearly than the excitement of anticipation, was the aftermath. The shadowy ghost of the slain airman who might be the ghost of my father asking not to be forgotten, not to be allowed to die, had not appeared on the screen. The search for this image would have to go on, though that day, fortunately, I didn’t know for how long. Eddie and I were quiet on the walk home. We’d been caught up in the action. We were kids. We loved the spectacle of gunfights, warfare, aerial acrobatics. Had I noticed the bad acting, how tiresome the one young, brooding pilot was, the one who’d lost his best friend and couldn’t stop whining? I loathed him. Did I hear how bad some of the lines were that Niven had to pretend had meaning; how overpumped the music was that thankfully lasted only a few minutes? Of course. Even at ten I was a budding literary critic and a smart-ass. But I forgave it all, for I was being taken out of my humdrum life by the magic of the movies and into that great romantic enterprise, aerial warfare. So there we were, Eddie and I, in the aftermath of war, more than a little overwhelmed as light drained from a soot-filled autumn sky and the sun dropped below the three-story flats off Linwood Avenue. We were reentering both the gray world of everyday Detroit and the gray world of the movie, playing it over in our heads. Though chastened and subdued by the death of Major Courtney—I couldn’t recall Flynn being offed in another movie—I was deeply moved by the beauty of his sacrifice. I did not say aloud or to myself, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I’d never heard that statement. But that’s what I felt. Eddie and I passed the dry cleaners and then the Sinclair station; we were halfway home, two small Jewish kids trekking through hostile territory. Our drama was not played out over the boundless skies above the Western Front, and yet the lesson was the same: there were massive forces out there led by men who meant us no good. Some of those men we could already name—Henry Ford, Francisco Franco, Father Coughlin, Mussolini, Hitler—but most of them were both nameless and faceless, like the telephone voices commanding Courtney and Brand. All we had in our defense were our wits, our stamina, and each other. Seeing the movie a second time sixty-two years later, I found once again it affirmed the absolute and utter need for brotherhood. If we did not stick together we would certainly lose, though not as dramatically as Courtney plummeting earthward in a smoking spiral. If we stuck together, if we were driven by the belief we were a single being and fought with all the power of that belief, we’d probably lose anyway, but we would lose with honor. And honor meant everything to those two untested boys.
Philip Levine lives in Fresno, California and Brooklyn, New York. His most recent book of poems is The Mercy.
