In 1918, pilot Edgar Anscombe (Christopher Reeve) nearly dies in a training accident which kills his student. It's 1928. Edgar is a bitter mail plane pilot. Rebellious Tillie Hansen (Rosanna Arquette) is being sent to live with her aunt by her controlling father. She's not happy. Edgar's not happy either to have a passenger.

This was widely panned. I wanted to see what's the issue here. Early on, Rosanna Arquette is pushing too hard. She is so bratty to the point of being annoying. Then I noticed that non of the women are written well. Evelyn is super annoying and Rose is a problem in the romantic structure. Quite frankly, these men need to be alone. They are more compelling as loners. The movie needs to write out the two ladies back home. This is much better as a survival movie. While it wants to ship Edgar and Tillie in its bones, it can't and won't. It does not help that he keeps calling her Kid. Either make Tillie an actual kid or make this an actual romance. It achieves nothing by not being either. The melodrama gets to be too much. The survival against the wolf pack is plenty enough. My final take is that this is not horrible but terribly flawed.

Reeve portrays a ticked-off guy with starvation of social life, whose huge goal is piloting the U. S. Mail. This is after he is shown near the end of World War I where he is a military flight instructor, in which his goofball student panics and crashes both of them. Naturally, they are in the single file cockpit arrangement of a bi-wing aircraft -- that we used to see in Cartoonland. They hit a structure, and Reeve -- in front -- falls out or jumps out. The plane goes boom and explodes in a huge fire. Student-pilot ends up toast. Reeves walks away. Good old Superman. Where's your cape? Why didn't you fly away?

I have studied aviation in university coursework. I have also studied acting and stage makeup. Reeve's fake blood looked pretty real. Did he even take one of his pain pills? Maybe not, being such a tough war veteran who had already been in way worse Hell than the one to which he was subjected when he met the minor-in-age portrayed by Arquette. After the second wolf attack, at the end of the scene he had hardly any blood on his neck. Bad continuity.

There is more profit in flying mail than in hauling passengers. You can put a lot more mailbags in the space that a human can occupy, and make a lot more money than the purchase of one passenger air ticket. Mailbags don't talk back, or have rich fathers.

You can see in this film that passenger flying was rather new (post-World-War-One),and of course that the unimagined future would hold an entire new world of humans flying by the dozens-or-larger numbers in huge propeller and then jet aircraft -- not to mention the astronauts of the future space programs.

Reeve's character may have gotten the mail flying job because after the war ended, he may have been a blue collar person not educated enough to do anything else -- like having a business degree and working in somewhere like a bank -- like the father in this film. You talk about being a two-time loser!

I kept thinking, "Another crash. He's getting beaten up and bloody all over again." Later, he's attacked by trained movie wolves and gets hacked up ad infinitum. I think that with two crashes and two wolf attacks, he shouldn't have had any blood left. All of his unfortunate bad experiences were almost hilarious and entirely predictable.

Arquette has a needle and thread in her bag? Did I hear that right? She knows how to sew? What she does know how to do is "bang" a guy -- her supposed ex-louse-of-a-so-called-boyfriend. All of a sudden, Reeve tries not show his newfound unholy interest. Does he spend Thanksgiving with her in the hospital, or with that prune Mrs. Kotter around the family dinner table? Yes, the ending is ambiguous. Maybe Arquette will shoot Mrs. Kotter. Ugh.

Meanwhile, back at the bickering on the mountainside, all of a sudden the two leads started to soften toward each other. In the beginning, their relationship was hatred-on-wheels. That's the way a lot of movies start out -- they despise each other and later it's all lovey-dovey time. It's that Hepburn-Tracy syndrome. I hate you. You hate me. I can't live without you. Let's get married. Kissy-kissy.

Stunt people made a lot of money on this film. Piloting over the mountains, falling down the mountain and hitting their heads, etc. You know that our pretty lead actors are not going to get bloody or injured in actuality, right?

What stupid moron missed the oil leak? Must have been Reeve's friend. Was he spaced out on something? Maybe three of those pain pills. He was a droll sort.

And then the wolves -- great actors. Did they eat up the parachute that had the lead's "blood" on it? Yes, wolves would follow the people around. The blood scents are the big key. You might think that the cold weather and all that snow would make these cute little darling wolfies quite starved, and you would be correct.

I enjoyed this film. 10/10.

Few people know that Christopher Reeve was also an aviation enthusiast who had his own Beechcraft Baron. And he transferred that enthusiasm to his screen persona, an ex WW1 pilot who, scarred by an incident, goes on to flying mail planes in the early 1920s.

Roseanne Arquette played the spoiled rich girl who becomes his first passenger.

They crash land in the Nevada mountains and the rest of the movie concerns their survival and both of their personal transformations.

If you'd like to get a good idea about the birth of commercial flying I'd recommend the movie.