Hell's Angels (film) - Production

Production

Hell's Angels had been originally conceived as a silent, with James Hall and Ben Lyon as Roy and Monte Rutledge, and Norwegian silent film star Greta Nissen cast as Helen, the female lead, and was to be directed by Marshall Neilan. Principal photography began on October 31, 1927 with interiors shot at the Metropolitan Studio in Hollywood. A few weeks into production, however, Hughes' overbearing production techniques forced Neilan to quit. Hughes first hired Luther Reed, on loan from Paramount but still was in conflict over directing roles before hiring a more pliable director, Edmund Goulding, but took over the directing reins when it came to the frenetic aerial battle scenes.

Midway through production, the advent of the sound motion picture came with the arrival of The Jazz Singer. Hughes incorporated the new technology into the half-finished film, but Greta Nissen became the first casualty of the sound age, due to her pronounced Norwegian accent. He paid her for her work and cooperation, and replaced her, because her accent would make her role as a British aristocrat ludicrous. The role was soon filled with a teenage up-and-coming star found by Hall in a review, and hired by Hughes himself, Jean Harlow.

When Hughes made the decision to turn Hell's Angels into a talkie, he hired a then-unknown James Whale, who had just arrived in Hollywood following a successful turn directing the play Journey's End in London and on Broadway, to direct the talking sequences; it was Whale's film debut, and arguably prepared him for the later success he would have with the feature version of Journey's End, Waterloo Bridge, and, most famously, the 1931 version of Frankenstein. Unhappy with the script, Whale brought in Joseph Moncure March to re-write it. Hughes later gave March the Luger pistol used in the famous execution scene of the film's ending.

One talking scene filmed in Multicolor but printed by Technicolor, provide the only color film footage of Jean Harlow. (Multicolor was not prepared to print the number of inserts needed for the wide release Hughes wanted.) The inexperienced actress, just 18 years old at the time she was cast, required a great deal of attention from Whale, who shut down production for three days while he worked Harlow through her scenes.

During the shoot, Hughes designed many aerial stunts for the dogfighting scenes. Pioneering aerial cinematographer Elmer Dyer captured many of the actual aerial scenes. Hughes hired actual World War I pilots to fly the movie aircraft, but they reportedly considered the final scene too dangerous and refused to fly. The aviator in Hughes came out and he flew the scene, getting the shot. As the hired pilots had predicted, however, Huges did crash the aircraft, and was pulled unconscious from the wreckage. He spent the next few days recuperating in the hospital, where he underwent facial surgery. Three other aviators and a mechanic were not as fortunate. Pilot Al Johnson crashed after hitting wires while landing at Caddo Field, near Van Nuys, California, where most of the location filming took place. Pilot C. K. Phillips crashed while delivering an S.E.5 fighter to the Oakland shooting location. Rupert Syme Macalister, an Australian pilot, was also killed and Mechanic Phil Jones died during production after he failed to bail out before the crash of a German Gotha bomber, piloted by Al Wilson, which had been doubled by Igor Sikorsky's Sikorsky S-29-A, his first biplane built after his arrival in the United States.

Due to the delay while Hughes tinkered with the flying scenes, Whale managed to entirely shoot his film adaptation of Journey's End and have it come out a month before Hell's Angels was released; the gap between completion of the dialogue scenes and completion of the aerial combat stunts allowed Whale to be paid, sail back to England, and begin work on the subsequent project, making Hell's Angels Whale's actual (albeit uncredited) cinema debut, but his second film to be released.

With the majority of the film shot and in editing, Hughes realized a similar film, Darryl F. Zanuck's The Dawn Patrol would become a competitor at the box office. After attempting to lease all available period aircraft to stall his competitor, Hughes brought a lawsuit through the Caddo Company and the Gainsborough Corporation, that alleged that the screenplay of Hell's Angels was plagiarized. The lawsuit resulted in The Dawn Patrol being rushed through post-production in order to be in theaters before Hell's Angels. In late 1930, Warner Bros. and Zanuck won the suit.