Arthur Aylesworth | Through the Shattered Lens

(With the Oscars scheduled to be awarded on March 4th, I have decided to review at least one Oscar-nominated film a day. These films could be nominees or they could be winners. They could be from this year’s Oscars or or they could be a previous year’s nominee! We’ll see how things play out. Today, I take a look at the 1938 best picture nominee, Test Pilot!)

Test Pilot is all about charisma.

It tells a fairly simple story. I imagine that the plot seemed just as familiar in 1938 as it does in 2018. Jim Lane (Clark Gable) is a test pilot. In the early days of aviation, long before people took the idea of flight for granted, Jim Lane is a hero and celebrity. Whenever a new aviation technique is developed, Jim is the one who tests it. He’s the one who makes sure that it’s safe. Every day, when Jim goes to work for Mr. Drake (Lionel Barrymore), there’s a chance that he might not make it home. Not surprisingly, he’s cocky, reckless, and not prone to commitment. He’s also handsome, charming, manly, and quick with a quip. In short, he’s Clark Gable.

When the movie starts, Jim has only one real friend. Gunner (Spencer Tracy) is his mechanic. Gunner is a by-the-book, no-nonsense professional. He might enjoy a drink every now and then but Gunner knows his job and he knows his planes and, even more importantly, he knows Jim. Gunner’s a man of unimpeachable integrity, the type who will always call things as he sees them. In short, he’s Spencer Tracy.

One day, while on a test flight, Jim is forced to make an emergency landing on a farm in Kansas. That’s where he meets Ann Barton (Myrna Loy). Ann is beautiful and outspoken. She quickly proves that she can keep up with Jim, quip-for-quip. In short, she’s Myrna Loy and, before you know it, she and Jim are in love. Just as quickly, Jim and Ann are married.

The movie starts out as a bit of domestic comedy. Jim may know how to fly a plane but it quickly becomes obvious that he doesn’t know much about commitment or being a husband. When Jim attempts to buy his wife a nightgown, he doesn’t even know how to pronounce the word lingerie. (He asks a store clerk for help in finding the “lonjur department.”) However, Jim soon starts to find that married life agrees with him.

Of course, that’s a problem when your job requires you to defy death on a daily basis. Ann worries that Jim is going to go to work and never come home, fears that are intensified after a race with another airplane ends in a terrible and (for the other pilot) fatal crash. Gunner, meanwhile, starts to fear that there’s only so many times that Jim can cheat fate. Both Ann and Gunner promise that they will never leave Jim’s side.

Well, you can probably already guess everything that’s going to happen. Test Pilot is not exactly the most narratively adventurous movie ever made but, when you’ve got Gable, Tracy, Loy, and Barrymore all in the same film, you don’t really need to break any new ground, storywise. Test Pilot is an example of the power of pure movie star charisma. It’s watchable because the performances are just as entertaining today as they were in 1938. The film features Gable doing what he did best and Tracy doing what he did best and Loy and Barrymore all doing what they did best. In this case, that’s more than enough.

When it comes to the film’s numerous flight sequences, it’s perhaps best to try to put yourself in the shoes of someone seeing the film in 1938. Today, of course, we’ve been spoiled by CGI. We tend to assume that literally anything can happen in a movie. In the 30s, however, people couldn’t take special effects for granted. When they watched the flight footage in Test Pilot, they did it with the knowledge that it was filmed by people who actually were putting their lives at risk to get it. At a time when commercial aviation was considered to be a luxury, Test Pilot provided audiences with a view of the world in the sky and of the world below, a view that they probably wouldn’t have gotten a chance to see otherwise.

A huge box office success, Test Pilot was nominated for best picture but lost to another film featuring Lionel Barrymore, Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You.

Last night, as a gentle rain fell outside, I watched the 13th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set, 1945’s Scared Stiff. (The version in the box set appeared under the title Treasure of Fear, which was what the title was changed to when the film was later re-released. However, the film was originally entitled Scared Stiff and that’s the title that I’m going to use. Scared Stiff is just a better title and I happen to like the Scared Stiff film poster, featured above. So, just remember that if you ever find yourself watching an old movie called Treasure of Fear, you’re actually watching Scared Stiff.)

As I attempted to watch Scared Stiff, I was reminded of some of the problems that occasionally come with watching a film that has slipped into the public domain.

On the one hand, the public domain is great because it makes it a lot easier to watch old movies. And while it’s true that many public domain films aren’t exactly classics, there are a few gems to be found. For instance, since I started watching the movies in the Fabulous Forties box set, I’ve discovered The Black Book, Trapped, and Jungle Book.

On the other hand, being in the public domain means that virtually anyone can duplicate and sell a copy of the film. As a result, many of these films are available (and frequently viewed) in versions that are of an extremely poor quality and which have often been haphazardly edited.

That’s one reason why it’s going to be difficult for me to review Scared Stiff. The version that I saw was, even for a public domain B-movie, rough. The picture was slightly fuzzy and the sound quality was not the greatest. I don’t think you can ever truly understand that importance of a clean soundtrack until you listen to a scratchy one.

As for Scared Stiff itself, it’s a comedic murder mystery and thankfully, it’s only 65 minutes long. Jack Haley plays a reporter who covers chess tournaments for his uncle’s newspaper. Unfortunately, Haley’s not a very good reporter so his frustrated uncle orders him to go to Grape City so that he can cover a beauty contest, apparently believing that there’s no way that Haley could possibly screw that up.

However, Haley manages to do just that. He gets off the bus at Grape Center, instead of Grape City. He finds himself stranded at an inn that’s run by two twins (both played by Lucien Littlefield). The twins hate each other for reasons that aren’t clear. However, they do possess a chess set that was once owned by Marco Polo! One twin owns the white pieces while the other owns the black pieces! Haley wants to buy all the pieces but things get complicated when it turns out that a gang of thieves are also in town and they want to steal the set for themselves.

But that’s not at all! One of the passengers on the bus is found murdered and he has a chess piece in his hand. Of course, everyone suspects Haley. So, Haley has to get the chess pieces, clear his name, and hopefully get to Grape City before his uncle fires him.

Scared Stiff is way too frantic for its own good and I have a feeling that I would feel the same even if I had seen a version that didn’t sound scratchy or often look fuzzy. That said, it is interesting to see Jack Haley, who is best known for being The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, play a human being. Also of interest, to film noir fans, was that Haley’s girlfriend was played by Detour‘s Ann Savage. Both Haley and Savage gave good performances but it was not enough to save this misbegotten little film.