Credit After the Fact

When Warner's remake of The Dawn Patrol premiered on Christmas Eve, 1938, the closing credits featured one of the more unusual acknowledgements in movie history. I noticed this myself only recently, when I re-watched both the 1930 (Howard Hawks) and 1938 (Edmund Goulding) versions* of the movie, and I saw a name I wasn't expecting to see.



The very last person in the cast list of the 1938 (Errol Flynn) version is Leo Nomis, who is credited as "Aeronautic Supervisor." There are two things odd about this credit.

The first, and probably most dramatic, is that when the 1938 Dawn Patrol was released, Leo Nomis had been dead for nearly seven years. Nomis was killed in February 1932, performing a stunt for the movie Sky Bride. Those who knew him said he hadn't fully recovered from an automobile crash that happened while doing a stunt for another film. Nomis worked on the flying sequences of the 1930 version of the movie, and apparently doubled for the star, Richard Barthelmess, though Nomis is not credited on the film itself. His credit on the 1938 version of The Dawn Patrol is supposedly due to the fact that all of the flying sequences in the '38 version are taken from the 1930 version.

The second odd thing about this credit is that Nomis isn't credited as the aeronautical supervisor for the 1930 version.

On IMDb, at any rate, credit for that role on the first, Hawks, version of the film is assigned to Sterling Campbell (a Canadian who worked as a technical advisor, actor and director). I wonder, though: Wynne's The Motion Picture Stunt Pilots, about which I wrote previously, doesn't mention Campbell at all in his detailed description of the flying sequences of the movie. Wynne does claim that Nomis did most of the flying.

The British Film Institute, however, gets it right (and doesn't list Campbell at all). Because only if Nomis was in fact the flying stunt coordinator on the 1930 film could he have received that posthumous credit seven years after his fatal crash.

*I watched the two versions as nearly to simultaneously as I could: every reel or so (a reel runs about 11 minutes) I switched from one version to the other. It's a very odd experience to watch two movies this way, because for large stretches I was seeing the same picture back-to-back, and then the 1938 version would expand on the original script and throw off the timing.