The Dawn Patrol (1930 film)
The Dawn Patrol is a 1930 American pre-Code World War I film starring Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was directed by Howard Hawks, a former World War I flight instructor, who even flew in the film as a German pilot in an uncredited role. The Dawn Patrol won the Academy Award for Best Story for John Monk Saunders, an American writer said to have been haunted by his inability to get into combat as a flyer with the U.S. Air Service. It was subsequently remade in 1938 with the same title, and the original was then renamed Flight Commander and released later as part of the Warner Bros. film catalog.
Theatrical release poster
Left to right: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Richard Barthelmess and Gardner James
The aerial sequences from The Dawn Patrol had a remarkably long lifespan, appearing not only in The Dawn Patrol (1938) but also in British Intelligence (1940).
Richard Semler Barthelmess was an American film actor, principally of the Hollywood silent era. He starred opposite Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920) and was among the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. The following year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for two films: The Patent Leather Kid and The Noose.
Barthelmess in 1934
With Lillian Gish in the 1920 release Way Down East
Silverscreen magazine, 1922
Collage of various characters portrayed by Barthelmess, 1920