Battle Taxi

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.

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.

No doubt, the film contains more than its share of deficiencies, which have been amply pointed out in previous reviews of this title. But we have to remember that it was probably shot on a minuscule budget, and most likely in a heluva hurry, for the war had been over for at least a year before it got released. For me, "Battle Taxi" rates 4-5 for cinematic quality, but as a document of aviation history it's at least an 8, and for sentimental value (for me), it's off the charts. Along with Richard Widmark's "Hell and High Water," this was my favorite movie back around 1958, when I was four years old. My old man was an Air Force fighter jock at that time, having flown F-80s in Korea, now stationed at Hamilton Field north of San Francisco, flying F-86s. For whatever reason, I absolutely loved helicopters, especially the H-19, and a Chickasaw pilot lived on the same street as we did in Novato. One of my earliest memories is of being invited out to the base to see a real H-19, and actually getting to SIT IN THE COCKPIT, while my brother and cousins had to stand below in the cargo bay. I hadn't seen this film in at least 30 years when it showed up on TCM around 2005. Yet I remembered it in almost every detail, especially the "truck gas" episode. Seeing it again was a priceless time-warp experience. PS: for any H-19 fans out there, floating around YT is a 25-minute Army training film about pre-flight inspection of the Chickasaw. I would have given my last toy revolver back in 1958 to have seen that!

This film was a mainstay of late-afternoon television in the NYC area in the late-fifties, early-sixties, having been shown at least a half-dozen times or more. As an early teen at the time, I enjoyed watching it, especially after having built a Revell model of the Sikorsky helicopter featured so prominently. The brief sequences of jet fighters flying overhead just made it all the more entertaining to my young eyes. In those days, America could do no wrong, but regrettably, we would soon learn otherwise.

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.