L'Équipage: Anatole Litvak

I can't stand love triangles. They're a cheap way to produce drama and tension. But there are films that have done them decently. Anatole Litvak's L'Équipage is one of them. The story of a World War One aviator named Jean who unknowingly begins an affair with the wife of his co-pilot named Maury, L'Équipage is emotional and powerful. It is also a fantastic technical feat. Litvak's camera is incredibly mobile even in tight interiors. For a 1935 sound film, there are none of the glaring passages of dead silence that plagued so many of its contemporaries. The film features fascinating narrative ellipses. We never see Jean meet Maury's wife. They begin the film having known each other for only twenty-four hours, yet they are already madly in love. Neither do we see Jean and Maury's first mission together. Instead we watch the rest of their squadron try to distract and busy themselves as they fly a potentially suicidal mission. In a way, this seems to predict similar scenes in Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (1939). But the most interesting aspect of L'Équipage is Maury's wife Denise, who was perhaps best described as "almost wraith-like...an intriguing variant on the classic femme fatale, a naive woman of passion who appears oblivious to the havoc she causes." But I disagree. I think she knows exactly what kind of havoc she is causing. She just doesn't care. She wants what she wants and to hell with everybody else. I haven't hated a character so much in quite a long time...

8/10