The Sunday Intertitle: Flyboys

And shagged you. Gary Cooper berates Colleen Moore, having just kicked her up the arse, in LILAC TIME.

The movie, directed by George Fitzmaurice (with uncredited assist from Frank Lloyd) is clearly designed to cash in on Coop’s star-making turn in William Wellman’s WINGS. Although the Montana mule had been bumming around Hollywood for a few years, and even taken leading man roles, his single scene as a laconic flier in the Oscar-winning aviation/war epic gave him the Big Push needed to ascend to star status. So repeating the trick with Cooper as an airman opposite Colleen Moore was a cinch for box office success.

Moore, implausibly, is a French farmgirl, and Cooper, even more crazily, is some kind of English lord, a double feat of casting madness possible only in silent movies, where it works effortlessly. Moore seems to have really worked at it, producing a trickbag of amusing Gallic mannerisms.

While WINGS had pretensions to delivering an anti-war message, LT merely remarks upon the sadness of our boys getting shot down, while celebrating the identical occurrence when it happens to the other side. Moore is recipient of a bunch of trophies captured from defeated German pilots, which adds an unintended morbid side to her characterisation. It’s all very elegantly made and the leads are appealing and the aeroplane stunts appropriately hair-raising, but Moore is too childlike to provoke the sexiness Coop was capable of, and it lacks equally the homoerotic edge that WINGS had, despite Clara Bow’s best efforts to heteronormatize the prettyboy leads.

Wait, what?

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