The Lost Squadron (1932)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) The 1920s were a wild time for movies, and you get a strong flavour of that in The Lost Squadron, a rather unusual film that takes WW1 aviators, then has them confront their return to civil society by landing them jobs as Hollywood stunt flyers — where they get to participate in the making of a war epic very much à la Hell’s Angels or Wings. There’s a meta-referential aspect to the film that’s more fun than a pure war film could have been, even if, at the end of the day, we’re there to watch the aerial stunts more than anything else. This early sound film does feature such notables as Mary Astor, Joel McCrea in an early role, and Erich von Stroheim cast rather well as a tyrannical film director. I’m not going to exaggerate the appeal of the film – it can feel repetitive at times, and perhaps a bit too glum to be fully enjoyable – but there’s something unique about The Lost Squadron and the glimpse it gives into those quasi-madmen who were inventing the discipline of stunts at the dawn of big-budget movie-making.