Marking Ford’s first return to Universal in eleven years, Airmail is a routine but well-told aviation adventure yarn written by Dale Van Every and Lieutenant Commander Frank “Spig” Wead and starring Ralph Bellamy as the beleaguered chief of pilots at a desert airport, coping with a reckless subordinate (Pat O’Brien). Wead was a retired U.S. Navy flier who had turned to screenwriting after breaking his neck falling down the stairs of his home in 1927; John Wayne plays Wead in Ford’s 1957 biographical film The Wings of Eagles. The desperate gallantry of Wead’s heroes (as also seen in Howard Hawks’s Ceiling Zero and Ford’s They Were Expendable) stems from their ability to carry on in circumstances ordinary people would find utterly demoralizing. Ford, who sublimated his own frustrations into creating a better world onscreen, viscerally responded to Wead’s sense of selfless duty. Ford and Karl Freund, the cinematographer of Murnau’s Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh and Lang’s Metropolis, filmed Airmail with intricate, extremely dark compositions, emphasizing the harrowing toll exacted from the pioneering mail pilots in the performance of their daily routine. Ford’s pacing is meditative in contrast with Hawks’s more dynamic and absurdist handling of a similar Wead story in the 1936 Ceiling Zero. The sobriety of Ford’s approach, depicting a small outpost surrounded by constant physical and moral danger, invests Airmail with a German expressionist feeling of oppressive doom that helps redeem it from the clichés of the genre. Gloria Stuart, now best known for her role in Titanic, is the leading lady of Airmail. The spectacular flying stunts established Paul Mantz as an ace Hollywood pilot (he was killed in a flying scene for The Flight of the Phoenix in 1965). 
(from Searching for John Ford)