"Hell's Angels"

CCLXIV

Howard Hughes in the Director’s Chair around 1930 wearing his signature argyle socks

Howard Hughes decided not to sell the Hughes Tool Company. Instead, he bought out his father’s junior partners (including an uncle) with part of the million dollars cash he’d just inherited. Striding confidently into his father’s offices shortly after he’d become sole owner of the business, he told senior staff, most of whom he’d known his whole life, to prepare to diversify.  What he meant by that nobody yet knew.

Howard spent just enough time in Houston to assert his control over the company, and he picked up a wife along the way. Ella Rice was a young, pretty, and wealthy Houston socialite of the family that had given Rice University its name.  They had been acquainted in childhood but Ella had spurned his boyhood advance. Howard swore vengeance. He decided he would marry her. Immediately after tying the knot in a garden ceremony attended by all of Houston’s upper crust, the newlyweds travelled to Los Angeles --- or, at least Ella rode the train there while Howard flew. 

Ella Rice Hughes

It was a bad augury for domestic bliss. At twenty-one, wealthy beyond reckoning, and fascinated by everything, Howard Hughes simply ignored Ella, who must have wondered many times what she had gotten herself into.

Hughes hit Hollywood like a tsunami. Young, sexy, and above all rich, he quickly gained admittance to the various studio heads. The old men of Hollywood weren’t particularly interested in him, but they wanted the use of his money. Hughes learned a valuable if cynical lesson, that people use other people, and often shamelessly. Howard soon uttered the dictum, “Every man has his price, or a guy like me couldn't exist.”

He wanted to fulfill his father’s dream and make movies, so, just like that, after waving a stack of greenbacks, he was a producer. Howard’s interest in moviemaking went far beyond the bottom line. The moment he stepped onto a soundstage he began questioning everyone from the director to the lowliest script girl, learning not only what their jobs were, but how what they each did went together to make a movie happen --- how movies worked.  

Hell's Angels (Full film)

Hughes brought home a studio camera and spent his time disassembling it and reassembling it overnight so that he understood how it functioned and how it saw what it saw. It was one of the few times he spent an evening at home with his befuddled wife.  He even asked about the chemical properties of celluloid. 

Armed with the knowledge he had gained from grips, gaffers, cinematographers, editors, second unit men, scriptwriters, directors and studio heads, it did not take long at all for Hughes to begin making suggestions. Since he was the money, his suggestions often made it to screen, and when they didn’t he found more compliant people to make his films. He discovered the director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). Milestone’s first movie for Hughes, a silent comedy named Two Arabian Knights, won the Academy Award for Best Director of a Comedy in 1929.

Lewis Milestone

Howard seemed to have the Midas touch for moviemaking. The films he produced included The Conqueror (with John Wayne as Genghis Khan), Son of Sinbad, Macao (a romance involving China Clippers and intrigue in the Far East), The Las Vegas Story, The Tattooed Stranger, Behind the Rising Sun, The Outlaw (a film he also directed, with its famous exposure of Jane Russell’s breasts), Scarface (still a classic gangster movie with Paul Muni, and the one that inspired Al Pacino’s 1980 performance as a small-time Cuban cocaine dealer), Sky Devils, The Front Page (later remade as His Girl Friday  with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell), his World War I aviation epic, Hell's Angels (which he also directed), and The Racket  (Hollywood’s first gangster film, made in 1928).  He also wrote the script for His Kind of Woman, another film he directed. 

Few of his films lost money, and a few are considered classics today. Even The Conqueror with its ridiculous casting is memorable.

John Wayne never should have tried to play a Mongol warlord in The Conqueror. The immediate effect was laughable, but the long-term effects were not. Filmed on a government reservation in Nevada, nobody knew that nuclear waste was buried underfoot, and everyone connected with the film set died of cancer, including Wayne and his co-star Susan Hayward

Two Scarfaces and their “little friends”: Paul Muni (1932) and Al Pacino (1980)

The Front Page (1931) and His Girl Friday (1940)

Jane Russell in The Outlaw  in 1943. Hughes was fascinated by her breasts and invented the underwire bra to give her a more pronounced cleavage. She usually went commando under her skimpy top since Hughes’ invention was uncomfortable. The Hays Office, which censored U.S. films for decades, objected to Ms. Russell’s endowments. Howard was stunned: “Tits?” he was said to have roared. “They don’t like tits? Who the hell doesn’t like tits?” Hughes’ fixation on full-figured women influenced American male thinking for a generation: Within a few years the “ideal” woman was represented by Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield

The young producer-director was soon notorious for his seemingly endless sexual dalliances. Hughes was known to have bedded the actresses Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Janet Leigh, Rita Hayworth, Mamie Van Doren and Gene Tierney, among others. It is believed that he had sexual relationships with Dudley Sharp (his father’s business partner’s son), and with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ramon Navarro, Richard Arlen, William Boyd, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. Insulated from scandal by his riches, he soon developed an underground reputation for extreme sexual experimentation as well. 

After four years of utter spousal neglect, Ella Rice filed for divorce. Howard gave his already wealthy young wife plenty of money and sent her packing back to Texas where she soon remarried, quite happily. Hughes had no time for a wife anyway. 

It was Gene Tierney who said, "I don't think Howard could love anything that did not have a motor in it," but when Tierney’s daughter (by another man) was born with disabilities due to rubella exposure during the pregnancy, Hughes paid for all of the child’s costs of care.

The fiery Rita Hayworth in color

Gene Tierney. "Gene" was not a stage name; she had been named after an uncle Eugene who died in youth

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Like his father, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., he was known for his aggressively masculine action-adventure roles. His bisexuality was a closely kept secret

One of many theatrical posters for Hell’s Angels. Hughes tried to turn his cost overruns into the promise of a blockbuster film

In 1927 Hughes began production on a World War I aviation epic, Hell’s Angels. The film starred Ben Lyon, James Hall, and John Darrow. It marked the first screen appearance of Jean Harlow.  

Hell’s Angels was supposed to be Hughes’ answer to Wings, the film destined to win the first Oscar for Best Picture, but Hughes’ increasing compulsivity for perfection took the movie out of contention until the dawn of the new decade. Hell’s Angels concerns the rivalry between two brothers, Monte and Roy Rutledge, two Allied fliers during World War I, and their friendship with Karl Arnstead, a German pilot; Harlow plays the love interest of all three.

Hell’s Angels was Jean Harlow’s only color film. She was famous for her sexiness, her vamping, and for her bleached blonde hair, but not her acting which was described as “simply awful”. Audiences didn’t seem to care.  Tragically, she died in 1937at age 26 of kidney failure

The film is remarkable for its aerial realism, which garners praise even today. Hughes himself, it is said, went aloft as a stunt pilot. The film was nearly done when the “talkie” The Jazz Singer was released. Scrapping much of the more than two million feet of film footage, Hughes reshot the picture with sound. Then Technicolor was introduced, and Hughes reshot portions of the film in color. 

Color footage of Jean Harlow in Hell's Angels

His striving for perfection knew no bounds when it came to Hell’s Angels, and he fired directors on a near-daily basis. At least four, and as many as eight, directors besides Hughes himself worked on the film at different times, including Lewis Milestone, who, like several others, was not credited.   

Hughes rewrote the script constantly, insisted on cutting and editing the film largely by himself, and caused a brouhaha among studio executives when he sabotaged a rival film Dawn Patrol by leasing every biplane in the greater Los Angeles area to halt filming of that picture.

“Let me go slip into something more comfortable.”

It took an unheard-of three years and four million dollars bring Hell’s Angels to the screen, the most expensive Hollywood film made to that time.

Jean Harlow and Ben Lyon

The cost was not cheap, even in non-monetary terms. Two pilots and a ground mechanic were killed during a dogfight scene. Howard himself crashed a plane and broke some bones. 

Hell’s Angel's original leading lady, Greta Nissen, had to be replaced when the film went to dialogue because her thick Norwegian accent was incomprehensible to audiences. Censors being censors were incensed at the fact that Harlow (at all of eighteen) wore no lingerie and was falling out of most of her clingy silk costumes (the film’s release predated enforcement of the restrictive Hays Code in 1934, and its often prudish censorship). It was Harlow in Hell’s Angels  who uttered the classic line, “Let me go slip into something more comfortable.” 

Having spent nearly four million dollars on production, Hughes mounted the most expensive marketing campaign ever seen for any film. 50,000 people came to the premier at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, forcing the LAPD to call out the National Guard. 

The film was a massive hit and it made Jean Harlow a star, but in a day of nickel and dime movie houses it, unsurprisingly, barely broke even. Howard Hughes didn’t care. He had created his aviation epic. 

Newsreel footage of the opening of Hell's Angels in Los Angeles, 1930