After the success of Submarine, another adventure of ordinary heroism and even too fond male friendship, once again with Jack Holt and Ralph Graves. In his autobiography, Capra recounts how Flight was based on an embarrassing athletic episode that he had seen in 1929 in Pasadena; a local football player ran across the field, escaping the impossible and holding the football tight, finally reaching the end zone. But it was the wrong one, and the player scored the winning touchdown for the other team, Georgia Tech. Ralph Graves noted that it was “the story of my life” and wrote the film story combining patriotic enthusiasm, leftover comic material, routine romanticism and a special attention to the use of sound: “one of the most fluid of the early talkies” (Joseph McBride). The film tells the story of Lefty Phelps who joins the Marines flight school in order to forget his humiliating football past and, with the encouragement of instructor Panama Williams, finds a way to redeem himself. Critics have unanimously judged this film as Capra’s most anti-liberal work: “A glorification of American imperialism in South America, a surprisingly up to date representation of guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua, the rhetoric of nationalism. But also here the style is comic-book like, and the guerrilla fighters wear the familiar face of old, dear Indians. And Panama the cowboy is a kind of ‘Luciano Serra’ pilota, another horse rider who leaves the saddle for the cockpit”. (Vito Zagarrio).

Paola Cristalli