In The World War II Combat Film, Jeanine Basinger cites AIR FORCE (1943) as the perfect WW II flyboy film; Donald C. Willis in Films of Howard Hawks thinks it’s crap (he has a deep dislike for war films that want to be both exciting adventures and grim Price of War tales). I fall somewhere in between.
The film starts Dec. 6, 1941 with a bomber taking off from Pearl Harbor for a test flight. It’s crew includes Gig Young, Harry Carey, Arthur Kennedy and John Garfield, scattered into the typical combat-film ethnicities (Texan, New York Italian, etc.). Garfield’s character is fed up with military service and ready to quit; a supporting character sneers that bombers are crap and the real excitement is flying fighters. Both will have to learn to subordinate themselves to the needs of the many, a standard element in such films.
During the flight the radio operator picks up some disturbing chatter, almost like there’s a war on or something … and they return home to discover it’s the day that will live in infamy (typical for the era, Air Force blames Japanese American sabotage for part of the damage — in reality there was none). Off they go to Wake Island and Manila, both of which the 1943 audience knew would soon fall to Japan …
This starts incredibly slow and talky, and I’m not sure it would have worked better if I’d seen it when it came out — I find it impossible to care about whether flying fighters or bombers is superior and the Pearl Harbor attack doesn’t have the gut-punch quality I imagine it had back then. It picks up steam, though, particularly in a tense section when the crew have crash-landed at Wake and have to get the plane back in the air before the Japanese forces seize it (it’s implicit in this section that letting Japan scavenge the plane would be more serious than losing the men). the ending, though, didn’t work for me — it felt headed for a downbeat finish like They Were Expendable, not a thrilling victory over a Japanese naval group. “I remember every honeymoon we didn’t have — including the first one.”
Two more from Leonard Maltin’s 151 Films book —
LA CIUDAD (1999) is El Norte without the optimism and upbeat ending, a grim cinema verite look at Latino immigrants struggling in a Big Apple of dangerous job, incomprehensible bureaucracy and dishonest employers. Well done, but not what I was in the mood for.
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001) is a goofy musical in which writer/director John Cameron Mitchell stars as the eponymous, angry transwoman singer (the Angry Inch refers to what was left after her botched sex change), performing in bottom of the barrel venues as she pursues the former lover who stole most of her songs and went on to stardom. I think I’d skipped seeing this before under the impression it was a Cabaret knockoff; turns out to be much more charming than I thought, though the dream/fantasy ending didn’t entirely work for me. “I chopped the legs off the whales and turned dinosaurs into lizards.”
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