Battle Taxi

A very good movie for all the aviation buffs : it can easily be considered as the "Sikorsky H-19 " helicopter definitive film. Then , there are a lot of good old Sabres and Shooting Stars, some S-51 Hely and other USAF stuff of the period(F-51 , B-45, B-29, Hu-16) . Haiden was a super actor and Franz did his best. A must for all the Hely lovers and aviation fans. Typical production of the early fifties, mainly done to promote Air Force and to give an idea of the hard work usually done by the Air Rescue Service men. The aviation movies regarding the Korean conflict are usually full of North American F-86 Sabres and are the vehicle for daring and handsome Fighter Pilots. This B movie is an honest one mainly produced to inform people of the obscure and dangerous work the SAR people performed and still do in saving life of pilots.

Sterling Hayden, a very good and underrated actor, plays a grouchy captain whose one and only goal is to keep his rescue helicopters flying. However, he has a hot-shot new pilot (Arthur Franz) who has ideas of taking wild risks and it puts him in the hot seat with Hayden. Through the course of the movie, time and again, Hayden's slow and steady mentality turns out to be the right one and Franz learns to be more of a team player.

Throughout way too much of the movie, the film makers uses TONS of stock footage--too much. It's as if half the film is stock footage. Fortuantely, while a lot of the footage is irrelevant, at least it's high quality and of the correct sorts of planes and equipment. But as a result, the whole thing comes off as cheap and a bit dull. Frankly, I wanted to see more of Hayden's grumpy but entertaining performance---though at times the dialog he and the rest of the cast were given was pretty bad.

I am a huge airplane buff, so I enjoyed seeing the A-26s, B-29s and F-86 but not much more piqued my interest. While there weren't that many Korean War films, you could easily do better with better low budget films like Samuel Fuller's "Steel Helmet" or "Fixed Bayonets". All in all, a boring film due to crap production values.

The kind of thing I'd love to hear the back story on. When allowed to happen, perfectly well acted, good story, great realism (not the hardware, but Art 15 for screwing up, yelled at by superiors over paperwork...) and well enough scripted.

Also yes, AMAZING access to military equipment, including current helicopters. And then... they wasted much of it. Long sequences of stock montages for no reason, they even ran the film backwards during a flying scene, rather obviously.

Also photographed pretty boringly. Overall decent, could have been good to great. Wasted opportunity but still a must see for helicopter nerds.

Everything about this movie is wrong.... or just plain bad.

From the writing, directing, choice of stock footage, etc.... the dialog stunk to high heaven. The editor of the stock footage even screwed that up by showing a few seconds of a jet about to start, then the blades revolving as a big radial on a B-29 started to turn followed immediately by the blast of a jet tailpipe as it begins to taxi..... I can't go on. This has to be at or very near the top of the list of really bad war movies of all time. Close ground support by jets instead of the prop jobs that actually did it held over from WWII. Huge formations of aircraft fly over constantly as though at a big air show, which is probably where most of the stock footage came from. Just awful.

Very similar to other war films of this type where a "rebel" is eventually turned into one of the more regular guys via a few heroic acts of course. The usual love interest was missing and I had expected to see a few pretty nurses here and there for added complications.

The stock footage was poor with some of it being very well known WWII footage, the soldiers on the railway line and the plane attacking a bridge for example.

It could have been, and should have been, a lot better than it was considering the assistance they had from the real rescue service which was largely wasted.

Not worth watching except by those with an interest in helicopters.