The Last Flight

Although the story is derivative of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises", novelist and screenwriter John Monk Saunders brings his own style and a better plot to this study of the "Lost Generation" wandering Europe during the 1920's.

The male characters desperately cling to drinking and all-night frivolity as a means of forgetting the terror of war, and they meet a similarly lost, though full of life, alcoholic woman played superbly by the under-rated Helen Chandler. Chandler's performance is so effortless that she seems to be playing herself, a woman living an independent, wild life with an unknown reason for also wanting to forget and escape. Watch her scene with Richard Barthelmess as they have a drink at a cafe during a rain shower before visiting a cemetery, and you'll see her longingly trying to imagine a simpler, happier life.

Barthelmess provides another expert performance to the film, as one of the saner, less-hard-drinking characters who half-heartedly tries to escape from the others on several occasions, but is always drawn back because of his love and friendship for the others.

See this film if you can - it's unlike any other.