Review of Air Force (1943) by Edith N — 29 Jul 2010

Apparently Where Over-Long Action Sequences Come From.

As I've mentioned a time or two, I took a film class in college. This was more than ten years ago, so there's a lot about it I've forgotten, if not necessarily the list of films we saw. And one of the first of those films, which we saw for World War II Week (it was The History of the Twentieth Century Through Film), was [i]The Sands of Iwo Jima[/i], which we will not be doing here. A group of us used to sit out in the hall outside the classroom every day, and one day, we got to talking about our test on the first three films (the other two were [i]Sullivan's Travels[/i] and [i]Mr. Smith Goes to Washington[/i]). One of the girls asked me what I had put for "Was [i]The Sands of Iwo Jima[/i] propaganda?" (For the record, "Oh, dear God, yes." Followed by a more detailed explanation.) This astonished her. Somehow, I never did find out how, she'd gotten the impression that it was never propaganda if it came from The Good Guys. This despite the really blatant nature, which may actually have been worse from this movie, actually filmed mid-war.

On 6 December, 1941, a crew of American Army Air Force personnel take off from San Francisco. They're your usual crowd of Typical Americans From Every Walk of Life. (Except the minorities. This one doesn't even seem to have a Token Jew.) Of course, in those days, it was a much longer flight, and they get to Hawaii at about six in the morning the next day, just about in time for the radio operators to mistake a squadron of Japanese Zeros for them. They end up diverting to an emergency backup field on Maui, where they are shot at by a completely imaginary squad of Fifth Columnists. So they divert to Wake Island just before it's overrun, and from there, they go to Manila just before it's bombed. So they travel from there to Australia and approximate safety. As they fly and land, fly and land, they experience the obligatory grief and heartwarming distractions.

To be fair to the movie, people at the time actually did think the Pearl Harbor attack was assisted by Japanese-American residents of the island. (Though funnily enough, the film doesn't come with the Warner Apology Screen which they put in front of any cartoon with possibly offensive material.) It's only to modern eyes that it's so incredibly painful. We know that not one single act of sabotage could be attributed to any person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. We also know, as it happens, that the Japanese living in Hawaii were not interned, because it was nigh on impossible to do so both for reasons of population and reasons of geography. (And the reason I don't call them citizens and have to dodge around the issue is that it was the law at the time that people born in Japan could not become citizens.) The thing is, we'd been underestimating the Japanese for so long that it had to be treachery and cunning, not actual military strength, which brought us down.

I really didn't connect to any of the characters emotionally. They were the sort of characters who appear in any movie of this type. We even have the token guy whose enlistment is almost up and who is planning to get out. And then comes the attack, and he's more gung-ho than the career military guys. As is their wont. There's the Outsider, the Proud Father, the Green Officer, and so forth, and the reason I don't say who played which character is largely because I can't remember which character is which. Oh, John Ridgely and Gig Young, I've got. Though of course Gig Young I remember mostly for the horrific end of his life. (IMDB lists his last marriage as ending with "her death," but since he shot her and then himself, one rather feels this is because they're unable or unwilling to change their standardized listings.) I mean, by the end of the film, they've even actually acquired a Cute Little Dog!

All in all, nothing really interesting here. I do think it worth mentioning that IMDB records two different fates for the real [i]Mary-Ann[/i], while Wikipedia asserts that there wasn't one to be lost in the first place and that a couple of different planes were used in filming, both of which were eventually used for training. Certainly the idea that not all men would last to the end of the War is hardly surprising--at one point, they mention going to Bataan, which won't end well for most of those who get there. The film itself acknowledges that it doesn't really know how things are going to turn out, because the war would last another two years. However, Howard Hawks notwithstanding, there isn't anything interesting about this movie relative to a lot of other movies of the same type from the same era. I mean, come on--it doesn't even have John Wayne.