The Last Flight is the first and perhaps greatest Hollywood film directed by William Dieterle (it’s up there with All That Money Can Buy and Portrait of Jennie). it is an enormously original and opulent film, before Warner Bros. dictated the style and “philosophy of life” of the subsequent “golden age” years. The American pilots’ story is perhaps familiar to the Viewer; they come back from the war physically alive but psychologically destroyed, and they try to adapt to life in post-war Europe, first in Paris and then in Portugal. The theme of shattered dreams present in literature and in the stories and novels by Hemingway and Fitzgerald is easily recognizable. The Last Flight is perhaps the quintessential “lost generation” film. It tells the story of men who slowly come to understand that their war training and experience continues to determine their lives. and that everything – perhaps even love – is just a slow preparation for death.

Little by little, the former soldiers realize that they are not heroes but outcasts who couldn’t even get a kite off the ground. “Wild Paris” of the 1920s creates an over-the-top background to the dramatic insight on the war’s permanent effects. They throw themselves into the fashionable life, like in a Raoul Walsh film; the difference is that Dieterle ’s work is shaded by a sense of humanism, both deep and responsible, without being overly serious, which justifies the viewer who mourns for these lost souls. Though The Last Flight was produced at the beginning of the sound film era, some of its best sequences contain an expressive eloquence comparable to silent films, skillfully using pantomime to communicate the sadness, compassion and contradiction felt by humans (toy guns in the amusement park) haunted by their war experience.

Peter von Bagh