Night Flight (1933)

Release Date: October 6,1933
Directed by: Clarence Brown
Studio: MGM

Costarring:
John Barrymore
Lionel Barrymore
Myrna Loy
Robert Montgomery
Helen Hayes

Available on DVD in The Warner Brothers Archive Collection

DearMrGable.com’s Movie of the Month, September 2013

Nutshell Review, February 2014

Gable does not appear until a good twenty minutes into this ensemble piece. It is a tale of 24 dramatic hours in the Air Mail industry, where pilots risk their lives every day flying through the pitch black night with limited instruments and no lights guiding the way. This time, it’s a vaccine needed at a children’s hospital in South America. Gable is Jules, a pilot who has lost his way somewhere over Texas, while his wife (Hayes) waits at home for him and grows more and more frantic. Gable’s scenes are limited to a cockpit.

Reviews

Photoplay magazine, May 1934

All star cast, with two Barrymores, Helen Hayes, Robert Montgomery, Myrna Loy, Clark Gable, others. Not much lot, but gripping tension and great acting, as night flying starts inthe Argentine. (Nov.)

Quote-able Gable

“We’ll either go over it or under it!”

“All right, jump!”

Behind the Scenes

Gable’s first experience working with producer David O. Selznick, with whom he would later work on Gone with the Wind.

Although mostly filmed on a soundstage, Gable did travel to Denver to film the mountain scenes, with the Rockies substituting for the Andes.

Earned a profit of $175,000, but MGM was still disappointed in the returns; the studio was expecting more from a film that contained so many from their star roster.

The film was based on a novel by French writer Antoine deSaint-Exupery. He hated the film and refused to renew MGM’s rights to his material, which he had granted for ten years. Because of this, the film was withdrawn from public view in 1942. When the rights lapsed, TCM got a hold of the film print and showed it at their Classic Film Festival in 2011 and it was distributed on DVD later that year. The film first premiered on the channel in 2012. The original film was said to be over 2 hours, however TCM’s print has been cut to 85 minutes.