Captain of the Clouds

I'm not positive I've seen a Jimmy Cagney movie before, so this is maybe an odd one to start with. It focuses on a group of bush pilots in Canada. Cagney's playing Brian, who keeps stealing all the other pilots gigs by undercutting their prices. But those customers had already made an agreement with the other pilots, who then fly out there to find they've wasted their time. From this I conclude that Britain sent their religious fundamentalists to what became the U.S., the violent criminals to Australia, and all the scam artists and insurance fraud types to Canada. You decide which place got the worst end of the deal.

So there's some initial hostility, but Brian eventually throws in on a deal with Tiny (Alan Hale) and Johnny (Dennis Morgan) on a deal moving supplies between mines over winter. Johnny intends to take his share of the dough and start a small airline, and also marry his gal Emily (Brenda Marshall), who Brian had been trying to make time with, until he decided he respected Johnny and wasn't gonna do it. Now he decides Emily will make Johnny waste all his money buying her stuff in the city, so he gets her to run off with him instead. Brilliant plan, except for the part where a despondent Johnny gives away his money and joins the Royal Canadian Air Force. Brian and the other bush pilots also join eventually (the film was made in '42).

It doesn't exactly work out the way they expected, and Brian struggles with that more than the others, costing him his career, and a couple of people their lives. And eventually he gets a chance to try to redeem himself, if that's what you can call it.

I doubt this is one of Cagney's better films, but I assume Brian's air of sleazy individuality, mixed with a bit of martyr complex, is not too far off the beaten path. Brian can't simply try to talk to Johnny about Emily, no he has to try and be clever about it, play it in some way that makes him the bad guy, and possibly lets everyone else save face. Because Brian can't outright tell Johnny he considers him a friend and doesn't want to see him lose his dream. Except his big sacrifice doesn't work. His and Tiny's bad drunk plan to show everyone what they can do doesn't get nixed once they sober up, and ends in disaster. He always has to do things his way, but in the final scene, that works out. If he had followed the rules, stayed in formation, everyone would have been shot down.

I feel bad for Brenda Marshall, who doesn't get a lot to do as Emily. She's supposedly deeply in love with Johnny, but can't tell the difference between his plane (which is all silver) and Brian's (blue, nearly black, with orange wings and tail), and this happens more than once. Which suggests she was more interested in the way out of town than who was doing the flying. She pretty much drops out of the film after Johnny finds her and Brian in the hotel, except for a brief appearance near the end. Maybe she's supposed to be young and not really sure what she wants, but she mostly comes off as unthinking and self-absorbed.

Dennis Morgan's sort of the co-lead, but gets the thankless task of playing the upright, by-the-book guy for Brian to clash against, even when they're working together. Which can be good roles sometimes, and Morgan carries a sense that he does want Johnny in the Air Force because he knows he's a great pilot, even if he hates the guy's guts. So he tries to protect him, tries to get him to follow the rules, impart his knowledge to the younger fliers, but within the regs. And that doesn't work either. Everyone is too set as who they are to change.