The Air Mail

Plot

Russ Kane (Warner Baxter) gets a job as a pilot in order to steal cargo. After making a forced landing, however, at a "Ghost City" in the desert, he falls in love with Alice Rendon (Billie Dove) and decides to become law-abiding.

When her father (George Irving) needs medicine, he flies to get it, but on the way back is chased by ruffians in other aircraft. As a result, "Sandy", Kane's friend (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), parachutes from Kane's aircraft with the medicine.

Meanwhile, escaped prisoners have invaded Alice's home. All is resolved when a sheriff's posse confronts the invaders and Kane destroys the bandit's aircraft. In the end, Sandy becomes a pilot.

Production

Writer Byron Morgan, himself a pilot, strived for authenticity in the story of The Air Mail. To find out what air mail pilots were encountering, Morgan flew on an air mail flight from Reno, Nevada, to San Francisco. The hazards that were found along the route including flying over the Rocky Mountains and inclement weather.

To make The Air Mail, the, Famous Players-Lasky company traveled by train to Beatty, Nevada, about 4 miles (6 km) east of Rhyolite, where it set up temporary headquarters on January 10, 1925. Aircraft used in the film such as the DH .4 and Catron & Fisk arrived from Reno via Tonopah. Stunt pilot Frank Tomlck was hired to do the actual flying in the film, eschewing the use of sound stages or studio effects.

The filming was completed by the end of January. During the filming, Famous Players-Lasky restored the Bottle House, one of the deteriorating buildings in the ghost town.

Reception

Critics deprecated The Air Mail as an "... up-to-date western adventure", virtually ignoring its aviation theme. At the same time, other features based on flying air mail, Trapped in the Sky (1922) and The Fast Mail (1922) were characterized as basically inferior to the Paramount production.

Reviewer Mordaunt Hall, writing for The New York Times in 1925, said that although Dove and Baxter in The Air Mail, "... deliver creditable performances", the story is "... only mildly interesting and often quite tedious". While he thought the scenes of aircraft taking off from the ground were "quite inspiring", he found the stock villains, Deadwood Dick adventures, and romantic conversations between a man at 4,000 feet (1,200 m) in the air and a woman on the ground to be improbable. "This picture ...", he concluded, "... is interesting because of the modern touch to an ordinary Western story, but the idea deserves to be more thoughtful and sincere."

Only one-half (four of eight reels) of a single print of The Air Mail exists today, stored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.