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!)

An Ideal Husband Part 2

A few posts ago I wrote about Oscar Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband", which is one of my favorite plays, although I have never seen it performed, because it's not that famous. I wanted to see it fleshed out somehow.

So I finally bit the bullet and rented the DVD of "An Ideal Husband", the one with Rupert Everett. I was reluctant to check out this version because I read so many bad reviews of it, but someone told me she liked Rupert Everett's performance as Lord Goring, and that it was a good movie. I suppose it was an OK movie, as long you have not read the play. I suppose Rupert Everett was good, as long as you don't know about Lord Goring. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

There were some good things about this film. The costumes were beautiful, as were the sets. As a production designer and a fan of Victorian fashion, this was a real treat. Some of the performances were very good, especially Kate Blanchett, but then again, she's always good.

Rupert Everett was good too, just as a performance, but not necessarily the way I picture Lord Goring. I liked a couple of parts where he gets philosophical and passionate, and yet still tries to maintain his airhead dandyish facade, even though it's painful, and he needs his friends to listen to him. However, other than that, I think he was miscast. For one thing, Lord Goring is supposed to possess an easy grace and disarming wit that is effortless, and it's pleasantly surprising and sort of thrilling when he turns he turns out to be intelligent and morally upright. It seemed more like he was trying too hard to seem frivolous, and he was sort of brooding. It's hard to put my finger on it, but he didn't seem very Lord Goring-like.

The biggest problem was simply the adaptation. Half the play wasn't in the movie, which is typical, but half the movie wasn't in the play, which is far worse! During the entire second half of the film, one thought kept going through my mind: "Not in the play!" If you took a drink every time a line of dialogue (or even an entire conversation) was not in the play, you wouldn't last halfway through the film, and the first half was relatively faithful. Not only was it annoying to not see most of my favorite lines and exchanges, but some of the changes were to actual themes and plot, and to the characters' motivations. I won't give any spoilers, but let's just say it was very shallow compared to the play, and many of the plot twists toward the end were over-explained, showing the screenwriters' apparent contempt for the audience's intelligence, or else rewritten, showing their apparent contempt for Oscar Wilde.