Air Force (1943)

Howard Hawks primarily made two kinds of movies: breezy, fast-moving, breathlessly paced features of conventional length, and long, serious, very involved, epic-length works that also entailed adventure and excitement, but took their time telling their stories. Air Force is one of the latter, made at the height of World War II, and covering as many bases as possible in its patriotic content, and perhaps a few too many for its own good. Screenwriter Dudley Nichols accomplishes a difficult feat with his script, building tremendous suspense during the first 25 minutes of the picture as the plot leads right into an event -- the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- the outcome of which everyone in the audience (then and now) already knew; he did this by focusing on the personalities of the men involved, and providing just enough detail to their characters so that, coupled with some fine performances, the roles were more than simple stock stereotypes. There are some marvelous sequences scattered throughout this movie, including the preparation for the initial flight, where Hawks introduces the key dramatic characters smoothly and quickly; the banter between the men on that flight, and the increasingly ominous and suspenseful mood as they approach Pearl Harbor; the death of a pilot, with his crew acting out their roles in a take-off that is going on in his imagination as life ebbs from his body; the "bucket brigade" loading gasoline onto the stricken bomber as its crew works frantically to make it air-worthy ahead of the advancing Japanese; and the take-off from Clark Field, which is the emotional payoff of the picture, with the crew finally able to cut loose with their weapons on the enemy swarming around them. Air Force manages to weave its spell through these stunning sequences, even as it defies logic -- if one stopped and thought about it, too much happens to this single air crew within the space of a couple of weeks to be believable, but between them, Hawks, Nichols, and the cast never give you the chance to break that willing suspension of disbelief. There's also a lot more on the tray here than excellent scenes -- Hawks and Nichols did a very good job of providing a multiple climax on Air Force. Had it ended with the take-off from Clark Field, that would have been exciting enough, but they give another 15 minutes of combat, heroics, and action, with ever-larger explosions in an ever-larger canvas of events. In doing so, you finally get to see the B-17 do what it was designed to do -- bomb the hell out of an enemy -- and they even address one of the design flaws in the original plane (no effective tail-gun). In a sense, Air Force is the airborne equivalent of that other great Warner Bros. wartime action release of 1943, Action in the North Atlantic, and almost as rousing and entertaining as well as more stylish. It's a shame to have to cite a major flaw in a movie as enjoyable as this, but modern viewers should beware of the way that Air Force presents the circumstances of the attack on Pearl Harbor: The script claims that Japanese saboteurs at work in the Hawaiian population played an active role in the attack, and that there were Japanese snipers infiltrating ground facilities; there were no Japanese fifth columnists in Hawaii involved in the attack, and the script's slur on the Japanese-American population of Hawaii is something that the movie must live down, and audiences have to get past to enjoy the movie. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide