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Grant, Lombard & March in a still for the movie. I'm glad that Carole lost the bangs later on.
Lombard, who appeared to lovely effect in one brief sequence as "The Beautiful Lady", who takes pity on Fred's near the breaking point WWI pilot on leave in London, is barely in this movie for five minutes. TCM must have received one of those 1939 prints of this movie, since a significant scene, reportedly showing Carole awakening and finding a flower on her pillow as a goodbye from March after a night of blessed forgetfulness, never appeared! It's probably lost, I suppose. Darn that PCA!
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The primary reason to make this movie part of a Fredric March fest? His great performance which builds with mounting disquiet after his first day in the air in France to his nearly honest conversation with a small, bellicose boy about the nature of war, and culminating in his still powerful speech to his fellow pilots celebrating his nailing a German ace who turns out to be a blond boy of 20. In this climactic banquet scene, he seems to be drunk as he claws at his medals, calling them bits of flesh, and asking what it was all for. This may sound melodramatic, but thanks to March's expressive performance, his interplay with Jack Oakie and a very young, gruff Cary Grant, and the beautifully framed scenes photographed by Harry Fischbeck.
Though March could occasionally be a bit of a ham when a part was poorly written or he was badly directed, (see the hootworthy The Sign of the Cross as primary evidence), when he relished a well-conceived part, such as this one, his parts in The Royal Family of Broadway, Les Miserables, Death Takes a Holiday, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Dark Angel, Design for Living, Nothing Sacred, and others from this very early part of his career, the guy was incredibly good even when fairly young.
I think that there was something of value in each decade of his career, whether So Ends Our Night, I Married a Witch, The Best Years of Our Lives, An Act of Murder, Death of a Salesman, Middle of the Night, Inherit the Wind, Hombre, or The Iceman Cometh. This actor may not be among the best remembered, but I really think that his career deserves a real retrospective. TCM is one of the few places that is capable of doing this well. They literally don't make actors like him anymore.