WHILE Americans in the islands of the Pacific were trying to deal with surprise and superior numbers in the first days after Pearl Harbor, an American flying fortress, the Mary Ann, was making a harried, four-day flight through the same area, unable to reach a safe airfield, fleeing because unarmed, or crippled, or out of gas, finally landing on an Australian shore. Warner Brothers have put a good deal of zeal, honest effort and integrity into “Air Force,” the story of this flight. They have also put ten stock Americans taken from the drawer marked “Service Picture Types” to man the Mary Ann (whether Warners know it or not, all ten are the same person). But the players instil into their ancient characters an earnestness and belief and enjoyment in the things they say and do. Most of all, the picture is full of wonderful views of air warfare: planes taking off, coming in on wheels or without, exploding by the dozen if they’re Japanese, a hectically cut—the best spot in this picture—airplane attack on a Japanese fleet, which is mostly wooden miniatures in a studio tank but enough newsreel as well to communicate the bedlam of battle as though it all took place in the center of an explosion. It is the best, most interesting, movie record to date of the Pacific war theatre.
In contrast to the English war films, there is no end to the heroism and the rewards for it that an American soldier can produce and earn in a Hollywood film. Each take-off of the Mary Ann is conceived as a great victory, pulled from the fire by the pilot. Each time the navigator plots a course, anxiety stacks up in great layers through the whole crew, the navigator himself almost goes to pieces, and his ultimate success is the occasion for backslapping and official wonder. Even the rear gunner, who flunked out of pilot school, gets his chance finally to fly the ship, the other men having bailed out, as he would have too had not the motor unexpectedly started kicking over. This goes along with his wonderful feats as a gunner. English movie fighters, with the exception of course of Captain Noel Coward, do their movie warfare as though it were only what was expected, which is probably more like the truth.
Of the players, John Ridgely has the tall, unbothered efficiency and respectable good looks of a pilot or a bus driver; the navigator, Charles Drake, has the blond passive largeness of a right tackle, and something that didn’t have to be there, a pensive quality. The rest fill out the portraits that the McLaglens, Lowes, Cagneys and O’Briens started: the tough, cocky little man, down on the service and his commanding officer, the Irish and Jewish comedians, Harry Carey, and the soft, good-looking Southern aviator that used to be Johnny Mack Brown and now is capably and graciously James Brown.
The photography of James Wong Howe, like the job he did on “Kings Row,” has great vigor. It is unwashed by the usual lacquered shadow, and uncentered in the old sense taken from painting, so that it seems to spread out in all directions past the boundaries of the screen. This technique, plus expensive accuracy and concern for details of décor and action, make the picture look as it should—like a newsreel, and a good if not profound record.
February 22, 1943