The Way to a Woman's Heart

(well, mine anyway)

Skywriting! I'm just putting it out there that any man who proposes to me in skywriting will win my hand in marriage*. If he is the pilot who does the writing, that gives him a bunch of bonus points.

Having gone to the airshow on a windy day and a not windy day, I was thinking about smoke and aerobatics. Which led me to think about skywriting. I think this is a fantastic craft, which apparetnly is making a bit of a comeback! I was informed today that I missed seeing some skywriting over my own town a couple of days ago. It's just as well, since the prop wash from my saffron-colored airship would mess up the letters....

Here is an educational film strip from 1935 about skywriting.




*Some exclusions may apply.

Monuments and Poetry

Mischievous, laughing boys, who grew

To quick manhood to be 'The Few'

Who flew above all human call

Through Summer's height to Autumn's fall,

Infring'd the sanctity of space

In freedom's name-and died in grace;

Falling like leaves upon the Weald

To russet-spot on English field,

Their brief, gay, valiant season spent

For us. Our task, their monument,

Nature herself has taken o'er

And has decreed for evermore,

'The Few' shall be remembered by

White chalk marks in a summer sky

That's one of my favorite poems. It's about the Battle of Britain but I don't know who wrote it. Nature may provide a fitting monument with vapor trails, but people have also built an amazing memorial to the battle. It's in London. I actually saw this at night, but it was not lit up and I didn't know what it was - just some walls with bronze statues. I wish I had seen the whole thing:

The story about is happening in each panel is awesome too. Monuments should be representational and realistic. It tells the story better, and the story is what people remember.
Here's another good poem:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew -

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee

No 412 squadron, RCAF

Killed 11 December 1941

He wrote that after flying a Spitfire for the first time. Awesome, huh? Here's a whole bunch of poems about flying.

I like this one:

An airman is always quite free, sir.
To land with a bump or a greaser.
Any old clunk,
can land with a thump,
But pro's go for smoothie crowd pleasers.

— Anon.

And this one:

The Co-pilot
By Keith Murray (Capt Colonial Airlines).
Written in 1941 and first published in October 1942 in
"The Airline Pilot" the monthly magazine of US ALPA.

I am the co-pilot, I sit on the right,


It’s up to me to be quick and bright;


I never talk back for I have regrets,


But I have to remember what the Captain forgets.

I make out the flight plan and study the weather,


Pull up the gear, stand by to feather;


Make out the mail forms and do the reporting;


And fly the old crate while the Captain is courting.

I take the readings, adjust the power,


Put on the heaters when we’re in a shower;


Tell him where we are on the darkest of night,


And do all the bookwork without any light.

I call for my Captain and buy him cokes;


I always laugh at his corney jokes;


And once in a while when his landings are rusty,


I always come through with, "By gosh it’s gusty".

All in all I’m a general stooge,


As I sit on the right of the man I call "Scrooge";


I guess you think this is past understanding,


But maybe some day he will give me a landing.

I have an mp3 of a different version that I think flows a little better, but this apparently is the original.

Diesel Punk. Meh.

I really don't know how I feel about diesel punk. I suppose all on it's own I like it. It's the future that steampunk becomes, followed by raygun gothic. I love the Rocketeer, and Tale Spin. I love heavier-than-air flying machines as much or more than aerostats. But something about it leaves me cold.

I think there are two things about it. The first one is that's it's 20th Century. Sometimes steampunk depresses me a little, because those people in their shiny goggles and lovely clothes and expressions of wonderment are going to have to get to the 20th Century eventually, with its WWI, and its International Style architecture. The 70s happen.... I'm not a fan of alternate history, so there's no help for it.

Still, I find WWI fascinating, and not just because of the aviators. Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series is a really cool fictionalization/steam/dieselpunkification of it. It has a bunch of the bad stuff in it, but it still retains a sense of worth-whileness and optimism and honor that most WWI stories don't manage. It was a human endeavor, fought with new machines and on a huge scale (although, honestly, hasn't anyone ever heard of the Seven-Years-War? That was really the first World War). Poetry came out of WWI.

Then there were the 20s and 30s. The golden age of aviation, an amazing era of exploration and prosperity (well, the 20s) and just a pretty cool time in general, unless you lived in the Weimar Republic... Strangely, there's not a lot of diesel punk in this era (Talespin and Rocketeer being notable exceptions, although the Rocketeer edges into WWII)

Freaking WWII. Now, I also, find WWII terribly interesting, but overdone. The History Channel, back when they showed history programs, knew of no other wars, and neither do game designers. Or diesel punk fans. My other problem with diesel punk is the fans. They are far more nitpicky than your typical steampunk, going on and on about this and that uniform and tank and gun and whatever. That's all well and good (I will geek out about military hardware all day long) but they ought to be nice about it, like steampunks. Where a steampunk will say "Ooh! What's that? That's awesome! Did you make it up? It's REAL? To wikipedia!" a diesel punk will be more like "They didn't have that yet."



That's the whole point of whatever punk! You cram cool shiny things together and try to figure out how they would work. It's supposed to be fun.

With some very well-done exceptions (most of which are not WWII settings), it seems like a lot of diesel punk is just WWII with more metal, a darker setting O_O and less human spirit. Where steampunk magnifies the heroic and creative person in an era that stood a chance of overshadowing people, diesel punk grinds and mechanizes the individual, rather than telling their stories.

It's all this:



and none of this.

No climbing Pointe du Hoc, no Audie Murphy, no Battle of Britain. Just CG models of extra big tanks, guys in gas masks, and hot SS dominatrices. Now, I know the SS had the snazziest uniforms in the war, and we all know how I feel about jodhpurs, but come on! Poetry came out of WWII too, but I'll save that for later.

Here's the example of nitpicking that prompted this post, a comment on my Talespin AMV, which I had described offhandedly as "baby's first steampunk". The comment was this (caps in the original):

Talespin is DIESEL PUNK as its defined using 30s era equivalent technology, clothing, and terminology. Most notable are Internal Combustion engines and Vacuum tube based electronic technology.

Sure, technically that's true. But who cares? Apparently I do, since I was annoyed enough to write a whole post about it. Anyway, "baby's first diesel punk" doesn't sound as good, and is not as understandable to most people. Maybe that's why diesel punk fans have a chip on their shoulder. They want to get out from under a genre that is all mushy and vague and anything-goes.

While we're over analyzing a cartoon, I might point out that Don Karnage's airship is like the one in Master of the World, which is Jules Verne. At 0:18 in the video you can see the steam engines on the side propellers, and they never specify what powers the upward-pointing rotors. I always figured it was either a later edition he added using piston engines, or else they run off the steam engines too, either using an electric turbine, or a simple belt drive. In the show, the Iron Vulture doesn't even make a typical airship noise (droning propellers) but rather the chugging of a steam engine. Many of his crew also wear older clothes - top hats, for example. He's a bit of a throwback in the setting of the story. The awesome level of detail Disney put into the show means you actually can tell how the tech works, and the pirates, at least, are still a little steampunk.

Is that the point of my video? No. the point is that Talespin is awesome, and Abney Park is awesome.

How cool was this guy?!?

Super cool! Felix Nadar, aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was pioneering photographer, baloonist, and all-around geek. He was friends with Jules Verne, and he liked heavier-than-air flying machines.

That is all.

Random Post Because This is Cool

So I just finished reading Seal Team Six. If you didn't think Navy SEALs were awesome before, well, you must not have been paying attention, but reading this book will get you up to speed. Anyway, as I was reading it, I looked up pictures of some of the weapons and aircraft in the book. Here is an awesome picture of an AC-130 gunship shooting flares and creating a giant eagle-looking cloud of smoke:

Christmas Post! On time this year!

I found the cutest Christmas ornaments! They were 2 for $5 at Costplus! Yay cheap! And they aren't glass, so my darling kitties can't break them! Yay indestructible! There were a whole bunch, but I got the cutest ones, a pig and a zebra in dirigibles! There were also pandas and elephants, and there were also the same animals in hot air balloons, but aerostatic flying machines ought to be steerable. Here they are!

The pig looks like he's having the time of his life, but the zebra doesn't look so sure of this newfangled contraption.

Also, notice the pine cone behind the pig. It's still attached to the tree! That's why we got this particular tree.

Some awesome planes!

Does anyone else think this thing looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie? It's the fe2b, a pusher fighter from WWI, that, despite its looks, was apparently pretty deadly and sturdy. In fact, Max Immelmann may have been killed by one, and the Red Baron had to make a forced landing after being shot by Donald Cunnel from a fee. It may have looked like this - that's the kind of plane the Red Baron was flying that day:

That was in 1916 and 17, when they had synchronizer gears, and didn't even need pushers anymore. See, the idea was, you could fire backwards and forwards, without shooting through the propeller, since it was behind you.

There were hazards though - the gunner was not strapped in in any way, and actually had to stand on their seat and shoot the rear the gun! And if you crashed, you had the engine come down on top of you. Also, the tail section was very delicate, compared to a normal fuselage.

I think they're cool though. Here's one that I drew, but I moved the guns, just because. Actually, it was going to be part of a different illustration.

Festive airship story!

So, I was on a break from slavishly working, Bob Cratchit style, on Christmas Eve, and I glanced through an issue of Smithsonian magazine that someone had left in the break room. They had an article about the Graf Zeppelin on Christmas. One of her regular missions was to transport Tannenbaums and Frohliche Weinachten to ze Germans who had settled in south America. It took the airship only four days to cross the Atlantic, and letters sent on her bore a special, and adorable, stamp.

It's a Christmas tree with a dirigible flying behind it! >D

If I had an airship, I would have a Christmas tree in the ballroom (yes it would have a ballroom).

What's with the Lafayette Escadrille movies?

So now I have seen (I think) all the World War I flying movies there are, at least on video and DVD. I saved the ones that are actually about the Lafayette Escadrille for last. And I gotta say, meh.

First, I rented "Lafayette Escadrille". I had high hopes for this one, since it was directed by William Wellman ("Wings"), who was actually one of the pilots who was in the real thing. I was a little suspicious of the fact that it was made in 1958, which is a little close to the 60s for my taste. The problem with this film wasn't that it seemed like a sixties movie, because it didn't. The problem was that it seemed like the first act of a bigger movie, and the Lafayette Escadrille was barely in it. In fact, it had very little flying at all. I suppose saying "I wanted more" isn't exactly a bad review, but when there isn't any more, it does mean the film is disappointing.

First, though, the good parts. Even more than "Wings", this film shows how the pilots lived, and how they were trained. It showed them trying to steer "penguins", basically plane bodies with stubby wings, and trying to follow orders and instructions in French. It also had the characters briefly meeting such awesome figures as Lufbery and Guynemer. The story was engaging, until it ended, and I was left going "Wait, where's the rest of the movie?" I was pretty into it, but it just wasn't satisfying. I'm not going to do a summary, since none of the issues I have are with the aviation-related parts, which were OK, but no "Hell's Angels" (curse, you, Howard Hughes - all dogfighting films are boring now!!!)

The best thing about "Lafayette Escadrille" is how it shows the reasons why they did what they did. Partly, they were young and seeking adventure, and fighting in the air force was the ultimate way to do that, but mostly they felt they should do something in the war, and they were angry the U.S. wasn't getting involved. That's not usually portrayed in movies.

Speaking of movies that miss the point, after several weeks I finally worked up the courage to rent "Flyboys". In those weeks I read the Red Baron's book, Eddie Rickenbacker's book - Fighting the Flying Circius, and James Norman Hall's series of magazine articles, in order to form a perfect picture in my mind, a picture that could withstand the thrashing that film would inevitably give it.

It actually wasn't as bad as I expected (not that it could have been). It was nice-looking, and the dogfighting bits were fun. Not good, but fun. Let us bear in mind that it was made by the guy who did "Independence Day" and "The Patriot", so yeah... The characters ranged from meh to lame, the acting was kind of appalling, and the story was totally predictable, except where it was surprisingly absurd.

The characters would have been OK if they had actually been developed. They basically had the usual mix of guys you have in a war film - the hotheaded guy, the religious guy, the nerdy skinny kid, the black guy, you know. They also had a rich snobby guy, a clumsy guy, and a guy whose family were all soldiers and he was eager to go carry on the family tradition... he was kinda weird. They had a leader, and he was distant and disillusioned - more on him later. The main character was pretty likable, but I hear he was inspired by Frank Luke. Let's just say he's no Frank Luke. This is mostly a personal pet peeve, but he should have been a miner from Arizona, not a rancher from Texas. What can I say - the Arizona Balloon Buster has a special place in my heart. The leader of their squadron was quite wanksty and needed to grow up and get over it. He was all "all my friends are dead and I only keep doing this for revenge and (the usual speech) no one even knows why we're in this war. You'll be dead in a few weeks too." Mr. Morale. None of the other characters were anything to write home about except some of them had some very strange (stupid) things happen to them. I did like their instructor, who was played by Jean Reno. My biggest problem with characters was that they each had their own personal reason for joining the Escadrille, each of which was all right, but not a single one was there for the actual reasons why most the real guys were, like doing the right thing for your country even when it hasn't figured out what the right thing is. It seemed very shallow.

I'm not even getting into the story. I do recommend watching this film though - it's worth a few laughs, and I would hate to spoil any spit-take worthy surprises. Seriously. Watch this movie.

Now for the technical things. First, the good parts. They show some training stuff that's not in the other films, and they have a pet lion, which is, strangely, almost historically accurate (there should have been two pet lions). Also, they have a very exciting attack on an airship. It's not quite as cool as the one in "Hell's Angels", but some parts were kind of interesting, such as how it's actually harder than it sounds to blow one up, even with incendiary bullets (basically because you can't get near it). What you have to do is upload a virus from your Mac to the German dirigible. I personally wish they would have shown some actual balloon busting, sticking with the whole Frank Luke thing. They also explain why Fokker triplanes were so formidable.

It's a good thing they do explain that, since the entire German air force apparently consisted of bright red triplanes, because, you know, the Red Baron wasn't special or anything. The main bad guy had a black one at least. They shouldn't have been using triplanes at all. But whatever - they did it on purpose to make it easier to tell the planes apart during the action sequences. I'm sure they could have found another way to do that. Like editing. Or painting big black crosses on some of the planes and red, white, and blue circles on the others...

The dogfighting scenes were fast-paced, but not really chaotic enough. They did try to show some tactics, like to get in a good firing position before shooting, using the sun and clouds, and things like that. There were some nice visuals, like when a bunch of planes come out of the sun, and when all the planes are fighting around the airship. A lot of the maneuvers they do are kind of stupid. For example, one time an American has a Fokker on his tail, maybe ten yards behind (and somehow unable to shoot him?) He does some kind of airbrake thing (not invented yet), pulls up, and uses his wheels to tear the triplane's top wing off. Uh-huh. Also, after making a big deal about how agile the triplanes are, and how fast they climb, the Americans proceed to fly circles around them, sometimes literally, in their Nieuports. Two or three times they do a move where they basically flip upside-down, let the triplane go under them (over their heads) and then finish the roll to drop onto the German's tail. It's shown in this video about Werner Voss, at 4:30. Except notice that in real life, Voss did the move in the triplane. That's the point of a triplane, and Voss was one of the most daring pilots when it came to the maneuvers he would do. He seems to have been a showboating rival character for the Red Baron.

It's a small detail, but there are parts where the propellers are spinning but the cylinders on the rotary engines are still. That's just an animation problem, but it's kind of lame. They should have grouped the engine to the propeller on the models, just like they were attached in real life. What's not a small detail is the way they show them flying through Archie, the German anti-aircraft guns. There's a funny part in Rickenbacker's book about what it's like to fly through artillery, and how it basically makes a bunch of shockwaves in the air. From as far as fifty yards one of those shells could knock a plane out of the sky. In the film they come considerably closer. It does make it more exciting, visually, and I would have done *almost* the same thing. What I would not do is have a shell burst right under the wheels of a plane, and the plane be OK.

My biggest problem with the dogfight scenes was the editing. They were done with computers, so there is nothing - NOTHING - they could not and should not show, and yet, they held back. It's not as though they had to put eighty planes in the sky with twenty-six cameras strapped to them and shoot miles and miles of film while endangering dozens of men's lives or anything. The usual (non-Howard Hughes) way of showing a plane getting shot down would be to do a couple of close-ups of guns and bullet holes, whatever intimacy with pilot death you feel your audience needs to see, the plane starts smoking and spinning down, you cut to it going behind a hill and cut to an explosion. The cuts are in there to protect the stuntmen, save the expensive real plane, and disguise your model. If you have an invincible digital model with an immortal digital pilot, you slam that plane into the ground and blow it up for all to see! Every maneuver should be shown in its entirety, since you don't need match-on-action cutting to construct the right moves, and you don't need clever angles to make the bad guys look closer than they actually are. The reason I love animation is that if you can imagine something, you can show it. It seems to me that the storyboarders, choreographers, and director weren't imaginative enough. They copied a bunch of dogfighting sequences from films with real-life limitations, instead of starting from scratch and showing us something we'd never seen before. Actually, there is a scene in "The Aviator", where Howard Hughes is shooting the big dogfight for "Hell's Angels", that has almost the perfect feeling of speed and stomach-churning acrobatics, and shots you could only get with animation. It seems somewhat ironic. Actually, the proper feeling in a dogfight scene might also be similar to the Quidditch games in the Harry Potter movies - truly dizzying action!

To me the "Flyboys" fights seemed detached, but that might just be the predictability of the story combined with the uninteresting characters, and I was the one who was detached. I just think a dogfight scene should be visceral and chaotic, but not like a Bourne movie. You should be in the pilot's head. You should be able to tell what's happening, but it should be blazing fast, and it should be scary!

Despite its sub-video game graphics and lack of any closeups of the pilots, History Channel's Dogfights series actually comes closest to this feeling, with the exception of "Hell's Angels". The dogfights in "Hell's Angels" are actually scary. They are some of the most intense and realistic portrayals of aerial combat - they show how unforgiving it is, how hard and frantic the most graceful movements are from the pilots' point of view, and how fragile those machines and the men who flew them really were. They used editing, not to disguise cuts between real planes and models (because there were no models), but to establish pacing and mood. Probably the longest shots were when a plane was going down, and they would show the pilot in the cockpit, dead or dying, or alive for the entire 15000 foot drop, with the shadow from his wings sweeping over him faster and faster as his plane went out of control. That, I think, is what made those scenes scary - death in a dogfight was lonely, and could come at any second, and even if you didn't make a mistake, you might just have rotten luck.

I, for one, am in awe of the people who fought in the air, and the ones who still do it to this day. (And it's not just because I kind of have a thing for airmen.)

This concludes what accidentally turned into a series about World War I films. Next up, Easter eggs (a month late).

Are the oldies the only goodies?

So, after watching almost every World War I flyer movie I could find (this week I'm going to rent "Lafayette Escadrille", and then finally bite the bullet and watch "Flyboys" *shudder*, and that will be pretty much all of them), I think the farther we get from history, the more people try to mess with it to suit their agendas, or just plain tell whatever story pops into their heads.

I watched "The Blue Max" (1966), which I thought was going to be good, since it has James Mason. I suppose it wasn't entirely awful - it started all right, and it had two good characters. The problem was the main character. From about thirty-five minutes into the film, I was rooting for someone to kill him. The other problem was the costumes on the leading "lady" *cough(hussy)cough*. Like many (most?) period films from the sixties, the men are in fairly accurate costumes, but the women have sixties eyeliner and that weird hair that's like a beehive or a bouffant on top but hangs down in the back. I almost can't watch movies like that. The really weird thing about this film in particular is that the women who are extras are all dressed in appropriately Edwardian-looking clothing and hair.

It also had bad dogfight scenes. Not only are they dull and don't show off any nice maneuvers or wide shots of the action, they also don't make a lot of sense. Basically, the main guy, and many other pilots whose POV we get to see, will fly towards a tiny speck, and begin blasting away (always the same shot too - looking through the propeller at his face with a lit-up machine on either side - a nice shot, but should be used sparingly). Anyway, not to sound picky, but Oswald Boelcke must spinning in his grave. The guns back then only had about ninety seconds of sustained fire, and were so inaccurate that the Dicta Boelcke and Mannock's Rules both say you should hold your fire until you're about a hundred yards away, if not closer, and preferably only from behind. Now, I might not be so picky (actually, yes, yes I would) if they didn't bring up this very issue right there in the movie itself. In one scene the main jerk character's armorer says that his guns had jammed after firing only forty rounds, or about two three-second bursts. It's kind of like in Star Trek when they are standing there in the transporter room talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - The audience was with you until you went and brought it up!!!

On a better note, I next rented "Wings" from 1927. It was the first movie to receive the academy award for best picture, and it truly is a great film! It also won for Best Engineering Effects. Also, the director, William Wellman, was actually in the Lafayette Flying Corps (not the Lafayette Escadrille), and apparently many of his films are about aviation and adventure, including "Lafayette Escadrille". (He also directed "The Story of G.I. Joe", which is an incredibly good film, based a real guy.) He's in the movie as well, according to this site, which has tons of info and pictures.

What a difference! Just like "Hell's Angels" which I wrote about earlier, this film actually gets to the point of World War I (which is sort like the point of World War II, oddly enough). Besides that, it's just a well-done movie. It's got great characters and fine acting (more subtle than many silent films), and an awesome combination of action, romance, suspense, and pathos, all thrown together in a melodramatic way that still had me actually jumping off the couch and crying, occasionally at the same time. I don't know what it is, but I get really into silent movies, and I think part of it is how you have to use your imagination, and you can go ahead and talk and yell and laugh and do whatever. Catharsis? I'm sure I learned this in film school.

But enough about that. What really set this film apart, for me, was the technical stuff! It shows how pilots were trained back then, and how they lived. It's very interesting. Then, when they actually get into some fights, it's just fantastic. The fights are cut in a way that makes them very intense, and shows off the actual dogfighting. The airmen who worked on those scenes must have been very good, because they do all the moves a geek like me would like to see in a dogfight, and you gotta figure multiple takes, flying with big running cameras on board, etc. They generally use four types of shots - looking at the front of the pilot with a view of the sky (and planes) behind him, looking from his POV past his guns, medium shot of the whole plane, and a wide shot of two or more planes with room to maneuver. Each shot of course had variations, being tighter or wider as the action demanded, and sometimes closeups of other angles, like instrument panels being shattered by bullets, or guns jamming.

My personal favorite thing about the dogfighting scenes was the title cards - yes title cards! Aside from showing the action in a very realistic fashion, they pop cards in to let you know what the pilots are thinking, what tactical use their artful movements serve, and how the fight is going (helpful since a German plane and a French plane look very similar from a distance and in black and white). It's especially cool that the director actually did those things himself. The language on the cards is very nice and poetic as well, throughout the film. I believe silent movies are their own medium, and the cards narrate in a way that is different from just showing the action, or even from spoken narration.

If you can find a video store that has "Hell's Angels" and "Wings" you should absolutely watch them both. It seems that after 1930, World War I aviation movies just weren't the same. Hopefully "Lafayette Escadrille" will be good, even though it's a talkie. (OK, Hell's Angels is a talkie too, but it was originally shot silent, then reshot with sound, so it counts!)

World War I Films, or, Why are they all Viet Nam films?

So I was trying to find some good World War I films that showed off the aircraft they used back then. Aside from the fact that there really weren't that many made, most of the ones I found were just so whiny! Now I should say that there are several very good WWI films, whiny or not, like Lawrence of Arabia, the Dawn Patrol, Galipoli, and Hell's Angels. And there are also a bunch of non-whiny ones that barely qualify as war films at all, focusing mainly on romance between girls and handsome pilots (not that I mind watching handsome WWI pilots).

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.