La patrouille de l'aube

This is what film-making is all about! The Vitaphone audio recording process challenges itself almost continuously in this early talkie. You aurally count the number of planes coming in (off-camera) while watching the reaction of the principals inside the office. You even get the correct fidelity of the wind-up gramophone as characters talk over it. Meanwhile, you watch aerial dogfights that switch seamlessly from soundstage re-creations to actual footage made by a camera mounted at the front of an aeroplane, without any jarring sense of displacement. The melodrama remains palpable with very little over-acting. I'm taking one point off for that occasional over-acting, and for the really dumb use of Southern California semi-desert topography in which the planes take off and land. It wouldn't have been that hard to find a location with a few more trees and more grass. Oh, well. The movie still must have knocked the original audiences' socks off.