Opening with the same train whistle that closed Cœur de lilas, Jean, a young officer in the French air force during WWI, bids farewell to his lover Denise and heads for the front. There he comes to admire the unpopular Lieutenant Maury whose gunner he becomes, only to discover that Denise is in fact Maury’s wife. Following this revelation, the two men head off on a suicide mission where the hard choice has to be made between fraternal loyalty and grand passion. The final sequence after the battle is pure Litvak: in a sacrificial gesture, Maury pretends he is not aware of his wife’s love for Jean. The deepest of emotions are swept under a rug, left unspoken.
By this time in his life, Litvak was trying to balance his love for fluid camerawork with more complex character study. In other words, to settle down to a stylistic approach that informed the rest of his career. With L’Équipage, Litvak also found his soulmate in the form of French novelist, pilot and future résistance fighter Joseph Kessel (of Army of Shadows and Belle de jour fame). Even though this Kessel novel had previously been filmed in 1928 by Maurice Tourneur, the understanding between two men, who worked on the script together (and later, on four more), mirrored the tense relationship between the pilots in the film. They both knew the meaning of masculine friendship and the joshing and hard drinking it involved. While making the most of that world, their interest lay more in the moment those men return to their rooms and have to deal with questions of fear or courage, loyalty or betrayal – the very core of their masculinity. For that, Litvak’s mise-en-scène alternates between the ruckus of men’s communal experience and the spartan silence of their loneliness.
Despite the film’s success, and its sober portrayal of a love triangle with Oedipal undertones, the antisemitic and xenophobic mood in Europe was growing so unbearable that it became Litvak’s turn to fly off to new horizons, this time to California. Interestingly, in the US the film was released a year after its 1937 American remake, The Woman I Love, which was also Litvak’s first Hollywood film. His timing was right because during the war his name was listed by a Vichy journalist as one of the people responsible for “French decadence and defeat.”

Ehsan Khoshbakht