Richard Barthelmess was in his mid-thirties when he starred above the title in The Last Flight (1931), a great and sui generis film about a group of friends who drink their way through post-WWI Paris, and he very much sets the heightened yet flippant tone. This is a picture about comradeship and gallantry; it is restless and sometimes effortlessly surreal both visually and verbally, for the characters find a kind of freedom by speaking in non-sequiturs.
Barthelmess does full justice to some of screenwriter John Monk Saunders’s most lyrical writing in The Last Flight, and he shows a macho humor that he rarely displayed elsewhere in his long career as a star. “What do you want me to do, burst into tears?” he asks at one point as his friends rave over the legs of their female mascot Nikki (Helen Chandler), and Barthelmess strikes an extremely worldly note here, even if in his earlier career he had been known for his stalwart heroes.
His mother taught the Russian diva Nazimova how to speak English, and she in turn suggested that the very beautiful young Barthelmess try acting on the stage. He appeared with Dorothy Gish in several comedies before taking the male lead in D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), in which he played a Chinese dreamer who takes in an abused young girl named Lucy (Lillian Gish). That famous movie looks increasingly unsavory, and Barthelmess is reduced to racist stereotype in the scene where his character advances on Lucy lustfully and then stops himself from going further.
But Barthelmess made for a truly gorgeous young farm boy in Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), especially in the moment when he first sees Lillian Gish and seems to fall in love with her right away, which Barthelmess expresses with a dizzying little physical turn. That gift for physicalizing emotion was on display again in Tol’able David (1921), which was produced for his own production company Inspiration Pictures and was a notable financial and critical success. As a young boy who must stand up for himself and his family against the evil of a group of nasty men, Barthelmess has a focus and an intensity that holds the screen both in close-up and in long shot, and he gets across an uninhibited sense of rural behavior that has rarely been shown on screen, all arms and legs and knees unconstrained by any city-like sense of confinement.
Barthelmess made films for Inspiration for most of the 1920s and was a particular favorite of female fans, and he sometimes tested himself, as in The Enchanted Cottage (1924), in which he does a Lon Chaney-like tour-de-force as a self-loathing wreck of a former soldier who shuts himself away. He had one final success in the silent era with The Patent Leather Kid (1927), for which he received an Oscar nomination for best actor for playing a cocky pretty boy boxer who goes off to war.
Barthelmess had a rather high speaking voice, but he made the transition to talking pictures; when he signed to First National and then Warner Brothers, he got into the spirit of that socially conscious studio and carefully selected his projects, which often had a message of some kind. In Son of the Gods (1930) and Massacre (1934), both of which are somewhat crude, Barthelmess dealt with the subject of racial prejudice against Chinese people and Native Americans. In other pictures for Warners, Barthelmess sometimes had trouble putting across Cagney-esque tough guys, but he was still capable of fine and sensitive acting in silent close-ups; his face started to thicken somewhat, but his staring eyes got even more burning and intense the closer he was to the camera.
As he neared age 40, Barthelmess seemed awkward still playing young hero roles, particularly in The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), where he looked prim and odd next to the fire of a young Bette Davis, but Barthelmess was at his latter-day best as a drug-addicted WWI veteran in Heroes for Sale (1933), a man who constantly gets screwed over by society who still holds out some hope in the end. That movie endorsed the selflessness of Barthelmess’s unlucky character, which is what many of his silent pictures did, but G.W. Pabst gets something very different out of Barthelmess in A Modern Hero (1934), where he plays a circus lothario who climbs his way to the top woman by woman; for Pabst, Barthelmess reveals a far more sexual side, something that had only been hinted at before.
In an attempt to hold on to his looks, Barthelmess underwent a face lift that was so botched that it left him with scars, and this hastened his retirement from the screen, but not before another tour-de-force: Mitchell Leisen’s Four Hours to Kill (1935), where he was effectively furtive and hunted as a criminal who is being sent to jail. He handles several monologues with skill and sensitivity in that picture, and he really gets the insecure posturing of the lower-class man he is playing.
Barthelmess always rose to the challenge of a good role and responded particularly well to his best directors, which is why he’s so movingly used by Howard Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) as a pariah of a flyer who once abandoned his flight-mate and has to prove himself for a group of fatalistic men; his staring face was tight with suffering in that classic movie. From Griffith to Hawks is a long journey, and Barthelmess decided he had had enough after a few more small roles.
For the last 20 years of his life, he lived off his real estate holdings and was usually not available for tributes or interviews about his past. In retrospect, it seems a shame he didn’t come back one more time for a western for Anthony Mann in the 1950s, for Barthelmess had made his name on morality plays about good versus evil and had the intense focus to handle anything that Mann might have thrown at him. He made quite a few classic or of-interest pictures, yet the flyer who drinks in order to “laugh and play” in The Last Flight is his most indelible and unexpected work in which Barthelmess appears to be taken unawares sometimes by the boldness of the theme and goes along with it tenderly and watchfully.
I love "The Last Flight" very much.
love him!