I will not talk about the ultimate achievement in the art of whining and missing the point that is both versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, nor will I go into the WWII movies-disguised-as-WWI movies, like Sergeant York, which was a deliberate propaganda piece to get Americans to think about entering WWII (as well as being a great film). It's like how MASH was really about Viet Nam even though it's set in Korea, but with the opposite message.
I'm talking about the early 30s WWI films here, and unfortunately I must limit it to the ones that are available to rent (*sniff* I want to see Dirigible. . .) Once again heading to my favorite video store (the one that still rents tapes) I picked up The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn. It's a very good movie, despite the fact that tension issues on this particular tape made it look as though the whole thing was filmed under water. It's got great characters and fine acting, and it's quite exciting. Flynn plays the leader of a squadron of British flyers in France. They are on their last legs, surviving only because they get new replacements every day for the men who are killed. Of course the replacements are basically cannon fodder for the far more battle-hardened German aces. During the film, Flynn's character makes the usual speech, looking off into the distance, about how they keep sending these boys up to die, and no one remembers what it's all for. Very "Bridge Too Far". I recall reading about another situation where it was all Britain could do to keep planes in the air, most of them piloted by young men who were lucky if they'd flown more than 10 hours. It's called the Battle of Britain, and of course their officers probably felt horrible sending them up knowing they had almost no chance of coming back. But they didn't pretend to have forgotten why they did it. Germany was trying to invade them.
So I took that tape back, after finally watching the whole thing, despite having to fast-forward it all the way to the end and then back to where I left off every time it got too hard to see. The guy at the store gave me a free rental. I was looking in the war films for 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (wrong war, but it's just so good, and Robert Mitchum is in it) when what should I see on the shelf but Hell's Angels!
Hell's Angels was directed and produced by Howard Hughes, and in 1930 was the the most expensive movie ever made. It's easy to see why. It has everything, including a long color sequence. It had the usual tinted blue-for-night, red-for-awesome-airship-crash bits, but this color sequence was actually in color. Other strains to the budget included a scene in an airship, which burns up and crashes spectacularly, much better than the one in the Rocketeer, and a dogfighting scene with countless planes on screen at once. When they filmed it they actually used something like 80 planes, which makes for some really really exciting dogfights, some of which are quite gruesome. The first time I saw it I was trying so hard to figure out how they could possibly have made it look so realistic, like did they use rear-projection? Did they use miniatures? Did they build cockpits and put them on moving stands? Turns out it was the obvious (and yet unbelievable) answer - they put a bunch of cameras on a bunch of planes and had themselves a dogfight! They reshot it a bunch and also had to wait around for months and months until they could get some clouds in the background. It has the Red Baron's Flying Circus (Jasta 11, which I was so impressed to see shown still using biplanes, the famous red triplane appearing only late in the war) and excellent special effects throughout. Basically Howard Hughes was one hell of a film-maker (it helps to be crazy).
But what makes Hell's Angels the best movie about WWI? They are fighting because Germany was stealing other countries. Imagine that. The final dramatic bombing mission in the film is to take out a munitions factory and supply lines so that when the infantry goes over the top to advance the next day, they won't get quite so slaughtered. It's quite clear, the lives lost are not shown as wasted, and it actually felt like the war it was made about, not like Viet Nam, which in real life wasn't even like "Viet Nam" as it's shown in movies.
