Air Force

Dir: Howard Hawks

1943

***

Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda film Air Force served a purpose and had the desired effect. It's regarded as a classic on many levels but when you strip it down to its bare bones it is a tool made to make young American men enlist in the Air Force during Second World War. It is factually flawed in several respects and it’s fairly predictable (if a character has a long goodbye scene, you know he won't make it to the end credits) but it looks great and the model work is very enjoyable. It is incredibly old fashioned for want of a better phrase, responses are delivered before questions are finished and emotional reactions to rather horrific situations are brushed off fairly quickly in 'Gee, whiz' fashion. Any writer could have written it and any film director could have filmed it but, why not hire the best, after all, it's for an important cause. Howard Hawks makes much better films than this but what he did with what he was instructed to make is very impressive. William Faulkner wrote the film's big emotional scene and it's just fine, although the delivery didn't really do it justice. It is easy for me to pass judgement on a film made decades ago, during war time that perhaps didn't have all the facts but the truth is that there had been many great WW2 films made before 1943 and many great ones made at the same time, most of them factual. Recruitment was of course vital but I stand by the thought that a good war film is an anti-war film. The real magic is in the aerial shots and the new filming techniques Hawks developed which changed the way action films were made thereafter. It is a fascinating look back at how cinema, propaganda and society worked during that era, so even though it is a fictional account, there is something historically important and rather interesting about it.