'Hell's Angels', now available on DVD in a beautifully restored version, can now be enjoyed by all of us with tinted and full colour sequences intact.

Directed by Howard Hughes (with dialogue scenes staged by James Whale),this war movie is famous for two reasons - one, it has some of the most exciting air-borne battle sequences to appear on film; and two, it marks the feature film debut of Jean Harlow. She appears in colour for the only time in the 8 minute Lady Randolph's Party sequence about halfway into the film.

The story starts with three friends at Oxford - two brothers, the good-natured Roy (James Hall),and the fly-by-night Monte (Ben Lyon); and a German student, Karl (John Darrow). An early sequence features one of the brothers taking the other's place in a duel - important to remember for later in the saga; while the turning point of the first part is of course the start of the Great War (forcing Karl to join the enemy, and Roy and Monte to enlist as pilots). Roy has a well-to girlfriend, Helen (Harlow),who isn't quite the angel he takes her to be.

The aerial battles are by far the highlight of the film, although Harlow is good in her role, vamping all who come into her path. Evelyn Hall is agreeably twittery as Lady Randolph, while Lucien Prival overacts as Baron von Kranz. Roy Wilson provides some comic relief as 'Baldy' Maloney.

Originally planned and started as a silent movie, 'Hell's Angels' still has some problems with pacing and comes across as rather stilted in places. Ben Lyon is a bit of a problem as Monte - fine as a relaxed civilian, he doesn't convince in the later sequences.

All this aside, 'Hell's Angels' is a good film and looks fantastic after its clean-up. A very interesting viewing experience.

Howard Hughes produced and directed (with a little help from Edmund Goulding and Howard Hawks) this 1930 aerial extravaganza, whose plot is both hackneyed and largely irrelevant, since one is merely waiting for the heavy melodrama to end so as to feast one's eyes on Jean Harlow and aerial combat scenes. The photography is magnificent, and one gets a kind of God's eye view of reenactments of World War I dogfights. The leading actors, Ben Lyon and James Hall, playing brothers, give such intense performances as to suggest at times that they are not merely emotionally but romantically attached to one another. Those old-fangled airplanes are something to see, as is a gigantic zeppelin, and the combat scenes, full of billowing clouds, the sky full of airplanes that resemble orange crates with wings, buzzing and whistling through the air like flies, are the stuff of dreams, and make this otherwise turgid movie come alive and live in one's mind long after it's over.

Howard Hughes was a perfectionist and it shows in these aerial shots, with biplanes whizzing around in Immelmans and spins, machine guns chattering, black smoke trailing. The cameras were obviously mounted on the airplanes in flight.

It sings a bit less on the ground. Two American brothers, Roy and Monte, are at Oxford when the war breaks out in 1914. (Kids, that would be the First World War. The First World War was the one that came before World War Two.) Roy is a highly principled and moral young man. His brother Monte is a little flighty. They have a good friend from Germany, Karl, who is conscripted and is sacrificed by the captain of the zeppelin that is bombing London. Too bad for Karl. A nice guy, really.

Roy and Monte wind up in the RFC. Roy, the virtuous one, falls for a peroxide blond, Jean Harlow, but she's as capricious as Monte, and when Roy catches the two of them smooching, he's naturally saddened. But the brothers overcome this contretemps and fly on.

They both volunteer for a suicide mission that will pave the way for the attack of a British brigade and save thousands of lives.

Aside from the thrill of the scenes in the air, what most catches the eye, or rather the ear, is the industrial strength language of the pilots. It sounds pretty rough, the kind of thing you wouldn't expect to hear outside of today's political arena.

There's no blood to speak of. The Germans are Prussian stereotypes, led by the hawkish Lucien Prival, but they're not inhuman. And it's exciting to see this gigantic, clumsy German bomber, a Gotha GV, being shot to pieces and still bringing the airmen down safely, at least for the moment.