Patrulha da Madrugada

Warner Brothers more than most of the other major studios had a habit of simply recycling the old plots of their films and repackaging them. A good example would be the boxing film Kid Galahad remade a few years later as The Wagons Roll at Night with the setting now changed to a circus. But in this case we didn't get a remake of The Dawn Patrol, we got practically a carbon copy.

I finally saw the original The Dawn Patrol that was made in 1930 by Howard Hawks and found that this film was practically a word for word remake of the Hawks classic. Of course it was no surprise to learn that all the aviation sequences were just lifted bodily from the first film, but probably more than that was done. Several long-shots looked exactly the same.

In a way this might have worked out because director Edmund Goulding who was not known for action films could concentrate on the actors and he got very good performances out of Errol Flynn, David Niven, and Basil Rathbone who step into the parts that Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Neil Hamilton did the first time around.

Still after seeing first one version, than the other, one might be complaining of double vision at that.