Robert J. Maxwell
This has just about everything a viewer might expect from a World War I movie about the RFC. Plenty of air combat, jollification in the evenings, fleeting amours in Amiens, some interpersonal conflict in the mess hall.Maybe that's part of the problem. There's hardly anything here that hasn't been seen before.It's by no means a terrible movie. The scenes of flying in those ancient crates are exhilarating. The performances are at least professional in caliber, although we get to see very little of the older establishment -- John Gielgud, Richard Johnson, Ray Milland, Trevor Howard. Instead the responsibility of carrying the movie rests chiefly on the shoulders of Malcolm McDowell as the squadron's commanding officer and Peter Firth as the new replacement, and they do well enough.I gather the play on which this film is based was a highly successful story of the infantry but those responsible for transposing it to the screen have turned it into a mediocre assemblage of familiar incidents without much in the way of glue holding them together.All the scenes are expectable if you've seen "Dawn Patrol" or "The Blue Max." The boyishly eager replacement has had fourteen hours of flight time. The more seasoned pilots put on a brave front, singing and dancing and boozing it up, but some are beginning to crack. McDowell needs a few belts before he can take her up. Simon Ward is unable to fly at all because he's down with "neuralgia" and is terrified of dying.The German pilot who is shot down and captured is given a royal send off to the prison camp. (I first saw that scene in "Grand Illusion.") The virginal Firth has a one-nighter with a French prostitute and returns eager to take up the emotional part of the relationship, but she's with another officer and ignores him.Nobody really talks about the fliers who haven't returned, but when Firth shows emotion, McDowell takes him aside and demands to know if he thinks he's the only one who cares.McDowell was in the same school as Firth and was dormitory chief or something, but nothing comes of the friendship. It's rarely brought up so there isn't the tension associated with such role conflict, as there is in "The Desert Rats." McDowell has been dating Firth's sister but although it's mentioned as a potential complication, it's dropped from the story.The movie LOOKS as if it hangs together but it's really a series of almost unrelated events that need some sort of central narrative conflict to carry us along.There's something else too. The flight scenes aren't really that convincing. The aerial photography is fine but every anti-aircraft shell seems to burst in the pilots' faces. It's as if the gunners were marksmen. The pilot smiles. Ka-boom, and the screen explodes into orange, and then we see the pilot staring grimly through the smoke, but he and his machine are unscathed.I'm not a techie when it comes to the history of guns but these guns fire at too high a cycling rate to be credible. And when an airplane goes into a tailspin it simply doesn't whine until it reaches a crescendo and smashes into the ground -- except in the stilted imaginations of some film makers. I don't know about guns but I know a little about spins. And I don't mean to carp, but such familiar conventions belong in cartoons.I see I've been a little harsh on the film but, as I said, it's not bad. It's just not nearly as good as it might have been. The director and some of the post-production people seem to have been nodding off at the joystick. If you just want to see men in snappy uniforms walking around arguing, singing bawdy songs, or trying to out fly the Hun, you'll find this enjoyable.
jlpicard1701E
Funny that I find myself forced to review this movie, but here I am.I am reviewing it, because just recently, I have had the chance to witness the revival of R.C. Sheriff's play "Journey's End" on stage in New York, at the Belasco Theatre, starring Hugh Darcy, Boyd Gaines, Jefferson Mays and others, as well as being masterfully directed by David Grindley.I left the theater shattered. I am not exaggerating, I was flabbergasted. After almost two and a half hours of a recreated and very claustrophobic depiction of soldier's life in the trenches of the Somme (I speculate), during World War One, brought to life vividly, by everyone involved, I came out of the theater with the shakes.Mind you, I am not easily shocked, nor am I too sensitive. I am a stage actor and a director myself, so I know the buttons being pressed to achieve certain effects, both emotionally, as well as psychologically.But what I had just witnessed, came so much to life, that I had chills in my spine as I left.None of these emotions came to life, while watching "Aces High", the movie based on this play and even adapted for the screen, in cooperation with R.C. Sheriff himself, shortly before he died.The screen adaptation takes place in the skies over France. So, gone is the claustrophobic ambiance to start with.The only plus of the movie, are the aerial battle scenes, which look dated in their special effects, compared to today's standards, but still very valid in the flying tactics adopted on screen.Granted there had been a couple of screen adaptations of "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque, which takes place in trenches, and not in the sky, but that was the "German" vision on things, if one would like to be picky on such things."Journey's End" is just the other side of the medal, and would have made it into a great movie, if they had left it alone and intact.The transfer on DVD is poor, even though in Widescreen and adapted for 16:9 TV screens, the quality of the film itself is that of a movie theater. Nothing more, nothing less. It sports various defects, such as minor scratches and dots, although the copy, for the rest, is clean.If you want another WWI movie in your collection, especially for those who love and enjoy to see aerial battles among old-timers, then this is a picture for you. But I rather would suggest "Von Richthofen and Brown" as an alternative, although that too, is a movie filled with inaccuracies.For the rest of you, who love good acting and drama, I would leave this one out. Buy the play. Go watch the play, if you have the chance to get a decent revival of it near you, but keep off this would-be adaptation.It is an anti-war movie, granted, but the weakest I have ever seen in my lifetime ever.The presence of actors such as Trevor Howard, Ray Milland, Richard Johnson and John Gielgud, is just a bluff, since they are just seen in very weak and very brief cameo roles throughout the movie.McDowell, the very talented Christopher Plummer, Simon Ward and Peter Firth, all deliver very weak performances, not due to their lack of skills, but rather due to lack of true and solid direction.There are too many gaps in it, and as said before, it drags itself to the dubious end. Dubious because in the original play, none of the men we come to know and sympathize with, stay alive. They are all killed in a fatal and futile mission. In the movie they all die, except Malcolm McDowell, who manages somehow to stay alive another day, being the wing commander of the unlucky bunch, just to receive another three pilots to fly and die for another lost cause.The end of the play leaves a bare stage in total darkness. You just hear the cannons roar, the machine guns rattle, and grenade impacts throughout the theater. Then, suddenly, total peace and silence. The curtain comes up. Lights. And here they all are. Lined up, standing straight and rigid. Obedient corpses...Far more interesting and far more shocking than "Aces High" finale, which is also dragged by the hair.It is up to you to judge.For me, if I had the money and the contacts to do so, I would take the play and develop it, the way it was meant. Adding here and there some action scene in the field, just to visualize the "outer" horror and slaughter going on in the "vasty fields of France", around the men involved, but then, just strictly concentrating on what is going on, in that tiny "shack" at the edge of sanity and the world...Want such a movie?Then ask for it.This is not it.
