Hell's Angels

Two Oxford brothers join the Royal Flying Corps, love the same faithless girl, and take the war into the clouds. Howard Hughes’s 1930 epic — three years in the making, reshot from silent to sound, and one of the most expensive pictures of its age — is the other great companion to Wings: real aircraft, real danger, and aerial combat that still dwarfs most CGI. Ben Lyon and James Hall are the brothers; Jean Harlow, replacing a silent star whose accent couldn’t survive talkies, becomes a pre-Code sensation with one change-into-something-more-comfortable. James Whale directed much of the dialogue; Hughes obsessed over the skies and even crashed a plane himself. A two-color Technicolor sequence and a Zeppelin raid add spectacle. It didn’t earn back its fortune, but it made Harlow and proved Hughes would spend anything to make the air look true.