"Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne."

Four American WWI pilots who've been disabled out of the service go to Paris to drown their sorrows in an absolute tide of alcohol. Cary burned his hands landing the plane so his gunner Shep could survive. Shep has a nervous tic that only goes away when he's drunk, so he drinks until he can't remember where he is or what month it is. Bill rushes into danger, tackling anything big enough to have a chance of killing him. Francis drifts into dissociation or outright sleep so often that he sets regular alarms on his watch, but when someone drops a glass he jolts awake, instantly alert.

The four of them meet Nikki, a young woman who initially seems eccentric and eventually seems as deeply damaged as the rest of them, though for more obscure reasons. They first meet her in a bar holding someone else's dentures in a martini glass. She explains that she's holding a man's teeth so he can go fight without risking breaking them, and surmises that he was a pilot who lost them in a crash. The men rush out immediately to see the fight, and return to find Nikki still there but the teeth gone. This dialogue ensues:

Bill: "Say! What's become of the teeth?"

Nikki: "Oh, the man came and got his teeth."

Cary: "Well, what did he say?"

Nikki: "He said thank you for holding his teeth."

The four pilots promptly sweep Nikki into their group. Cary explains, "Despite your practically innumerable faults, we adore you. We've decided to adopt you."

They quiz her about her life, and get answers that don't explain very much at all. She has a rich mother who she doesn't see. She writes. When they ask about her writing, she says, "I'll send you a photograph of my poetry." She says her toes were ruined by a childhood experience with too-small shoes. She drinks as much as the rest of them.

The men have a hanger-on, a man who claims to be a reporter and probably really is, though he's not writing about them. He follows them around, an unsettling presence; he has a job and seems not to have fought in the war, and likes to point out that he's the normal one. If he is, and he may well be, that doesn't say anything good about normality.

I mentioned drink. They drink a lot. I don't think any of them are ever sober after an initial scene in the hospital. They drink so much, and are so explicit about doing it deliberately, that it made me wonder about all those 1930s movies where everyone drinks relentlessly. Are they too trying to forget something?

Their conversation skitters between jokes, surreal non sequiturs, peculiar anecdotes, and offhand mentions of the horror and damage they're drinking to hide from. Nikki's bathtub is full of turtles, which she takes with her in a basket when they get on a train and appoints Francis in charge of sprinkling them regularly. He attends to this job with a determination that cuts through his permanent daze.

Despite Nikki mostly living on a dimension half a degree skewed from consensus reality, she has an uncanny knack for asking questions with deeply painful answers. When Shep warns her that Cary is brittle and needs to be alone because one insensitive remark will break him like a breadstick, she replies, "Well then, I don't think he should be alone."

We follow them as they drift from Paris to Lisbon, drinking and partying and joking as hard as they can. Despite the old-school theatrical acting style, the movie feels oddly modern in other ways, like a 1970s naturalist film that lets its cast improvise their dialogue, only sometimes they drift back into their screwball comedy script and sometimes they talk openly about their complete loss of meaning and purpose, and their sense that they died in the war and they're not really there, so what does it matter what they do?

The only thing that does matter is each other, their relationships. They're all very tender with each other. Nikki is paired with Cary, mostly, but it doesn't cause any jealousy. She loves them all and they love her, and they're all dancing as fast as they can.

In retrospect, Nikki holding the teeth feels like a metaphor for her holding the pilots' pain. But she has her own pain too, and she can't fix theirs any more than they can fix hers. When one of them eventually says he wants to help her, after a movie's worth of her saying she wants to help them, it's a big moment, but maybe just a statement of what was happening all along.

It's a strange, haunting movie, often funny and as often deeply sad. I've never seen anything quite like it. It was directed by William Dieterle, who fled Germany in 1930.

You can watch it free here.