[5]
Myrna Loy and Cary Grant play competing pilots-for-hire who fall in love after Grant’s character is blinded in a workshop accident. Grant’s blindness sends him into frustration and depression, but Loy does her best to give him reasons to live. She gets him a seeing-eye dog and encourages him to pick up writing. When publishers decline his materials, she lies to him and uses her stunt-piloting pay checks to fund phoney publishing advances. When Grant learns the truth, their relationship falls apart. But when Loy flies across the Atlantic in the third act, Grant hears on the radio that she’s stuck in heavy fog outside New York. He hops in his plane, aided by technology he’s been working on that allows pilots to ‘fly blind’ in low-visibility conditions. Loy is thrilled to see him in the air with her, but when he announces he’s going to fly away and disappear after leading her safely to ground, she scrambles for a way to stop him.
I love these two stars, but Grant is somewhat miscast in a role that requires him to be genuinely self-loathing and vulnerable. I can’t help but imagine Gary Cooper doing a better job with a role like this. What I liked most about Wings in the Dark is the relationship Loy and Grant have with their aviation comrades (played by Roscoe Karns and Hobart Cavanaugh). The foursome forge a sort of close-knit family that celebrates victories and mourns tragedies together. I also enjoyed the sequence in which Grant gets to know Lightning, his new seeing-eye dog. Unfortunately, the screenplay meanders a bit, obscuring a strong narrative through-line. At times, I found myself wondering, ‘What is this movie actually about?’ The chemistry between Loy and Grant is also a bit unconvincing.
With Dean Jagger. Directed by James Flood.