Aces High

[poliphilo]

 Aces High showed up on a YouTube site specialising in forgotten movies- and was the only title I recognised. I'd always wanted to see it.

Malcolm McDowell, Christopher Plummer, Simon Ward, Peter Firth: Quite a cast. With surprisng cameos from John Gielgud, Ray Milland, Trevor Howard, Richard Johnson.

And an impressive attempt at authenticity. The French are played by real French people, the Germans by real Germans. And where- in 1976- did they find so many planes? SE5s for the Brits, Albatrosses for the Germans. Pity the flying sequences had to be done over what was rather obviously the peaceful English countryside, but how do you fake up several miles of the Western Front on a limited budget before the days of CGI?

The script was based, but no slavishly, on R.C. Sherrif's Journey's End, with grace notes from Cecil Lewis's Memoir Sagittarius Risiing. I've read them both. 

 Those planes! Box kites fitted out with engines.  A rudder flips from side to side; what's it made of? Plywood? 

 The horror. Not only the fear and the dying, but the class prejudice, the wrongness of life in uniform, the girls resorting to prostitution, the having to be so bloody cheerful when you're emptied out of all soft emotions.....

 There's nothing we haven't seen before but it's an honourable trip down that Long Trail A-winding. I don't know why it's been forgotten.

Comments

[sovay]

The script was based, but no slavishly, on R.C. Sherrif's Journey's End

I had no idea! How neat. I'll try to watch it, especially with the vintage aircraft. Malcolm McDowell should have made a great Stanhope.

[poliphilo]

And he does indeed play the Stanhope character only, for some reason, all the names have been changed....

[chochiyo_sama]

I have not seen this movie, but I will definitely look for it in the future.

When I was in high school I read a book called Iron Men with Wooden Wings; it was about the WWI flying aces. They were some pretty tough fellows. I wish I could remember the author.

I remember reading about one flyer who survived two or three crashes in enemy territory, but ultimately ran out of luck when his plane was hit and he ended up impaled on a metal fence with pointed spikes on it. Poor bastard.

[poliphilo]

I went through a phase of being obsessed with the WWI flyers. I owned- still own- a book entitled Death in the Air- which purports to be the diary of a Flying Corps pilot- illustrated with with the photographs he took in combat with a Jerry-rigged camera. It turns out that the book is a fake, concocted by a guy who made a living creating special effects for the movies. It's a vey good fake and every so often I spot pictures from it being used in articles and online with no indication that they're not the real deal.