A 4K remaster puts a high polish on Howard Hughes’ WW1 air war epic — an enormous personal project that allowed the playboy tycoon to indulge his obsessions for women, movies and especially aviation. The film’s air combat has never been equalled: some shots have upwards of 30 aircraft buzzing through the clouds at the same time. The film made Jean Harlow an instant star; he even included a color sequence to show off her platinum hair. The sex attitudes are frank and shameless, and Harlow bares a lot in the name of pre-Code license. The new uncut disc is ‘multi-aspect ratio’ — the home video screen adjusts for a 1930 gimmick called ‘Magnascope.’

Hell’s Angels — 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1288
1930 / B&W + Tints / 1:37 Academy + 1.54 Magnascope / 131 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 18, 2025 / 49.95
Starring: Ben Lyon, James Hall, Jean Harlow, John Darrow, Lucien Prival, Frank Clarke, Roy Wilson, Douglas Gilmore, Jane Winton, Evelyn Hall, Marian Marsh, F. Schumann-Heink.
Cinematography: Elmer Dyer, Antonio Gaudio, Harry Perry, E. Burton Steene, Dewey Wrigley, Harry Zech
Settings: Carroll Clark
Set Decorators: Julian Boone Fleming, Sydney Moore
Film Editors: Douglass Biggs, Frank Lawrence
Music Composers: Hugo Reisenfeld, Adolph Tandler
Written by Howard Estabrook, Harry Behn, Joseph Moncure March story by March, Marshall Neilan
Dialogue Stager: James Whale
Produced and Directed by Howard Hughes

According to Hollywood legend, the only thing aviation and tool works magnate Howard Hughes loved more than airplanes and womanizing was the movies. He took one look at Paramount’s  Wings, the first recipient of a Best Picture Oscar, and committed his fortune to making the most spectacular World War I flying film of all. He personally took charge of the movie’s astounding aerial scenes, that include a giant dogfight in the clouds. At least 30 planes are on-screen at the same time.

Begun as a silent film, Hell’s Angels took so long to shoot that it was made obsolete by the arrival of talking pictures. Howard Hughes responded by reshooting all of the dramatic scenes with spoken dialogue. He employed stage director James Whale to guide the actors, but took sole directing credit for himself. That’s also when Hughes replaced his leading lady, igniting the career of one of the movies’ greatest sex goddesses. Jean Harlow shocked them all, setting a high bar for filmic sensuality. There was a censorship system called the Production Code, but the big studios had found various ways to circumvent its rules. Being a wildcat Hollywood independent, Hughes made the film the way he wanted it made, with no censor consultation. The resulting movie is unusually violent, racy and profane, even for a pre-enforcement Code thriller.

At 4 million dollars, this also may have been the most expensive film of the era. Twenty years ago the UCLA Film and Television Archive helped Universal restore Hell’s Angels, reconstructing it at full length and reinstating a sequence filmed in color — the only color feature footage ever shot of Jean Harlow. Her hair really was platinum blonde.

Some of the show still resembles a silent movie. Brief scenes begin and end with full fades, and the editing retains numerous silent-style inter-titles. The story commences in prewar Germany. After seducing a German woman, the undisciplined Oxford student Monte Rutledge (Ben Lyon) weasels out of a duel of honor with her rigid, traditional husband, Baron Von Kranz (Lucien Prival). Monte’s ethical brother Roy (James Hall) quietly takes his place. He survives, and tells no-one what he has done, especially not Monte. Back at Oxford, Roy is too noble to realize that Monte is making moves on his new girlfriend, the beautiful Helen (Jean Harlow, billed originally as Harlowe). War breaks out. The brothers’ friend Karl (John Darrow) is repatriated to Germany, and is made to fly a dirigible raid over London. The Rutledge brothers join the RAF for different reasons and are soon in France flying suicidal raids over enemy territory.

The big draw for Hell’s Angels is its spectacular flying, the realistic aerial scenes filmed and re-filmed for years by Howard Hughes. Paramount’s Wings had shown exciting aerial combat but it pales in comparison to Hughes’ two major flying sequences, which made minimal use of special effects and miniatures. Almost all the aerial scenes including star close-ups were filmed while aloft in aircraft that now look like flimsy kites. Thirty or forty biplanes careen through the sky in one close combat sequence.

Hughes’ flyers were a rough bunch of veterans eager to make big money and just as eager to prove their stuff on camera. Many shots look as though the pilots were taking heavy risks. Criterion’s extras report that two or three of them died while filming. We learn that Hughes’ ‘private air wing’ included Paul Mantz, who became Hollywood’s pre-eminent stunt flyer  until his death in 1965. Also listed is aviatrix Florence Barnes, aka ‘Pancho’ Barnes, the colorful adventuress immortalized in the book and film of  The Right Stuff.

The first flying scene is a giddy combination of expert special effects and anti-Hun sadism. Pacifist ‘good’ German Karl is a junior officer on a Zeppelin crewed by Kaiser fanatics. He misdirects their bombs away from Trafalgar square and into a lake. When the RAF closes in the German commander lightens ship by sacrificing his crew, ordering them to jump to their deaths. It’s a disturbing and macabre scene. The scene’s flying was all accomplished with miniature effects; the Zeppelin was an enormous model. In original showings of Hell’s Angels the Zeppelin looked even bigger through a gimmick called ‘Magnascope.’ Special stage masking opened up the projected screen, and a lens change (some say a zoom lens) enlarged the picture greatly.

Adding to the effect, the Zeppelin scene is tinted a bright blue. When the Zeppelin explodes, the flames burst forth in bright color, a staggering effect. It’s accomplished by what looks like the  ‘Handschiegl process,’ a matting-tinting trick. The vivid color effect also appears to be utilized for the barrel flashes of plane-mounted machine guns.

Hell’s Angels’ final battle gave Hughes an excuse to build a two-engine German Gotha biplane bomber. It’s actually actor James Hall strapped into the open-air gun position up front, in what has to have been the most dangerous acting assignment of the era.

Self-styled ladies’ man Howard Hughes tuned the script’s non-flying scenes to make most of Monte Rutledge’s sexcapades in Berlin, London and France. Society wives and willing barmaids decorate scenes until the brothers finally come up against the blonde bombshell herself. Jean Harlow may be ludicrous as an English socialite, but accents don’t matter when she slinks around in such skimpy costumes. Her Helen is pre-Code glory all the way, and she gets to utter an immortal line of dialogue:

The words always get a double laugh, because Jean Harlow is already wearing so little, we can’t imagine what she’s thinking of changing into. There’s nothing remotely mysterious about Harlow’s sex appeal — Clara Bow may have had ‘It,’ but Harlow convinces us that her characters thrive on ‘It.’  Helen literally looks game for anything: she likes sex, sleeps with men and is completely unapologetic about it. In a backless and all-but frontless evening gown, she comes on like Everything Young Men Want to Know about Women. It’s definitely ‘liberation’ of a kind — she set a libertine’s high bar for what could be gotten away with in the pre-Code era.

Helen is of course a male fantasy expressing Howard Hughes’ notion that women are unreliable, untrustworthy playthings. Helen’s story function is to reject one brother and humiliate the other. Just when we think she will be redeemed and the lovers reconciled, she opts for big-time harlotry in a petting party with a drunken British officer. The Rutledge boys must make do with other good-time girls.

The film’s language is pretty raw as well. The flyers shout very atypical dialogue from plane to plane: “Jesus Christ!”  “You son of a Bosch!” and then  “You son of a bitch!”  The Production Code watchdogs were not ready for such blatant non-compliance. Hughes found the Code Office and many state censor boards better prepared when he produced the equally shocking Scarface. Then a group of church ideologues got involved, and successfully promoted Code enforcement with more restrictive new rules. Howard Hughes would spend years fighting legal battles over his 1941 film The Outlaw and his highly-promoted sex symbol Jane Russell.

The film has some interesting politics. It seems to agree with a street agitator who shouts that it is folly to fight in a war that is really about the profits of capitalists. The soapbox orator is labeled an anarchist and beaten by the crowd. But his subversive reasoning is later adopted by the Bad Brother Monte and equated with plain cowardice. The only true love and loyalty in the movie is represented by Good Brother Roy; he selflessly takes Monte’s sins upon himself until the very end.

Compared to the romantic excesses of later stories like  The Dawn Patrol, Hell’s Angels is hardboiled to the extreme. Captured by the sinister Germans and accused as spies, the brothers’ fate is not sentimentalized. Monte and Roy recognize the officer who has captured them as Baron von Kranz, the dueling husband from their pre-war escapade in Berlin … he turns out to be an honorable enemy.  ←

Hell’s Angels delivers the kind of spectacle that viewers never forget. The history of Hollywood moviemakers is a chronicle of greed and lust, sometimes combined with tremendous cinematic ambition. Howard Hughes was obstinate, selfish and particularly hard on actresses … he kept his contracted talents Jane Russell and Jane Greer idle, making no movies for years on end. After two or three great shows Hughes’ contribution to film was mostly destructive, especially his obliteration of the once-great RKO Studios. His achievements and disappointments seem insane … or just another parade of American extremes.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Hell’s Angels is a big step beyond the old 2004 DVD, which was the first time in decades that Howard Hughes’s aviation epic could be properly evaluated. UCLA’s excellent photochemical restoration has been augmented with a 4K scan and a thorough digital scrub. Both picture and sound are brighter and more clear, yet retain the granular texture of the film stock of the late 1920s. The cut follows the UCLA reconstruction, with a four-minute intermission break and some exit music.

Criterion’s  transfer notes credit Universal for the 4K remaster without a lot of detail. The color sequence looks really good, almost too good. Today’s colorization software can ‘improve’ film images with colors that were never there, which is why we appreciated the restoration of the 2-color Technicolor  The Mystery of the Wax Museum for striving to reproduce the film’s original, strange appearance. The color sequence in Hell’s Angels is very attractive, but we’ll leave it to others to debate its authenticity. A page called the  Filmcolors Database has some frame grabs of what they say is the surviving color sequence of Hell’s Angels.

We described above how the ‘Magnascope’ process worked in premiere engagements. Magnascope would be used again when producer David O. Selznick became desperate to give a boost to his troubled fantasy  Portrait of Jennie . That film’s climactic storm sequence expanded in size and was tinted bright green.

For 4K and Blu-ray, Universal’s ‘digital restoration of the Magnascope Road Show version’ changes the film’s aspect ratio to emulate the way the image ‘got bigger’ to impress theater audiences. The Magnascope sequence just gets a little wider, expanding to a 1.54:1 ratio. Many viewers will not notice the switch, and nobody will be confused — we’ve become accustomed to watching Christopher Nolan epics constantly change aspect ratio between film formats. On video, if the movie is working we pay little attention to the changeovers.

Criterion obviously couldn’t interview any of the makers of Hell’s Angels, but they do find some qualified spokespeople. To discuss the film’s aerial visuals and special effects we have Robert Legato, the visual-effects supervisor for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator. While admiring Hughes’ flying circus from 95 years ago, Legato reminds us of the difficulties of shooting aerial footage. He says that he had to fake everything for the Martin Scorsese picture … nobody would try to reproduce what Hughes did.

Critic Farran Smith Nehme contributes an excellent visual essay about the 20th century phenomenon Jean Harlow, whose reign as a Hollywood icon lasted fewer than 7 years. Harlow proves 100 percent that acting alone does not make a star. It was apparently actor James Hall who recommended Jean Harlow to Hughes — and the 18 year-old actress immediately started working with the critical director James Whale.

It is Ms. Nehme who points out that the color sequence in Hell’s Angels was not 2-color Technicolor, but a competing red-blue process called  MultiColor. The release prints were made by Technicolor, which is why that company is listed in the IMDB. The two processes don’t appear to be at all compatible, but reading further on the subject leads only to confusion!

Jean Harlow biographer David Stenn comments on a selection of film outtakes. Stenn has the inside scoop on some of the actors, and then comes alive when we see the 18 year-old Jean Harlow waiting to ‘go on’ during the clapper slate for sound take. Among the bits and pieces saved — nobody seems to know why — are a few frames of Howard Hughes on the set, fussing with a scarf on a sofa.

The insert essay by Fred Kaplan is an excellent introduction to the wild filmmaking world of Howard Hughes. He identifies Greta Nissen as the Norwegian actress who Jean Harlow replaced when Hell’s Angels was converted to sound. The careers of both actresses ended in 1937, the year that Harlow died, at age 36. Ms. Nissen lived on for fifty more years.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Hell’s Angels
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good / Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Featurette interview with Robert Legato on the film’s aerial visuals (11 min.)
Featurette biography of Jean Harlow by Farran Smith Nehme (27 min.)
Hell’s Angels outtakes with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn (5 min)
Insert folder with an essay by Fred Kaplan.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 13, 2025
(7421hell)

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