Aerial Gunner

... It's 1943 and just about every film made that year involved some aspect of WWII. Even an MGM short about the weather called "Storm" hearkened back to that conflict. But I digress.

This low-budget war picture concerns airmen training to be tail gunners in bomber planes. Sgt. Foxy Pattis (Chester Morris) and Sgt. Jon Davis (Richard Arlen) have bad blood going back to before their military service, and things only get worse during the pressure of training. Can these two put their grudges aside in order to make the grade and become tail gunners?

This is corny and cliched, and the threadbare budget shows through quite often. The performances from Morris and Arlen are simply adequate, while young Jimmy Lydon gets to overdo it quite a bit as an emotionally-fragile recruit. Robert Mitchum has about three lines and shows up in one scene. This was one of nineteen movies in which he appeared in 1943, his debut year in pictures.

It is a propaganda war drama shot in 1943. There is romance, action, and nothing special besides that. Chester Morris and Richard Arlen are both worth the watch. Not a rare film though but that doesn't justify not to try it. If you are a gem digger, you should watch it. I don't know the director, never heard of him, but this film is really entertaining and brings however a good ending, in the pure tradition of those years or fight and sacrifice. Yes, a good light hearted propaganda feature to help audiences to forget the horrors of war or at least watch them in a smooth way. Good little film. I recommend it.

"Aerial Gunner" is a very low-budget WWII propaganda film that has many familiar plot elements. The trouble is, although there are MANY movies like this one (including, off the top of my head, "Flying Tigers", "A Yank in the RAF", "Captains of the Clouds" and "I Wanted Wings"), these other films are just a lot better. The film is made by tiny Pine-Thomas Productions and suffers from uneven acting (Richard Arlen wasn't all that good) and a cheap look.

Like most of the films above, this one is set in a training camp for the Army Air Corps. In this case, it's aerial gunnery school. And, like most of these films, it involves a cocky recruit and the man in charge of his training--and they fall for the same woman (quite the cliché). The trainee, like these other films, makes a nuisance of himself and in the end gives his all to prove himself and receive redemption.

The film contains NOTHING new...nothing. There are also elements of "The Eagle and the Hawk" and the ending a lot like "First Yank in Tokyo" and all the films above! Been there, done that....'nuff said....

A typical cheap WWII propaganda movie, but that's not to say it wasn't that bad. Not a great deal of war action until the last 10 minutes of the movie. The target practice scenes using a mobile target on a rail track was historically interesting. Seeing Robert Mitchum was a surprise, as his name did not appear in the opening/ending credits. It goes to show what a small part he plays. The rommance angle of the movie spoilt things a bit. Why do the writers always have two guys fighting over the same woman, when they have only just met her, then propose by the next scene? It would have been much better to stick to the gunnery training scenes, scrub the rommance angle, and have a bit more action.

Hollywood during World War II was slightly schizophrenic as it alternated releasing escapist movies that allowed theater-goers to momentarily forget about the war and patriotic "B" films that reminded all of the continuing threat and the cost of fighting.

"Aerial Gunner" is in the latter category, reflecting Tinseltown's desire to showcase every branch of the service and virtually every specialty (no film that I can recall honored the Graves Registration units nor were black contributions to victory the subject of main features. I wonder why.).

"Aerial Gunner" deals with - aerial gunners, those enlisted men whose skill with machine guns in swerving aircraft under furious attack often made the difference between getting back to base or going down in flames.

The government generously supported these film projects and in this movie the producer, director and cast were given not only stock footage but also a base, hundreds of servicemen as extras and planes to film.

Ex-New York City assistant district attorney John Davis (Richard Arlen) was quite hated before the war by Coney Island barker "Foxy" Pattis for prosecuting his dad, leading to the old man killing himself. Big surprise, both men wind up at aerial gunnery school where SGT Pattis is SGT Davis's instructor. And he's determined to wash the lawyer out. Real original plot.

But then the scriptwriter came up with something truly novel. Both Pattis and Davis fall in love with the same girl, Peggy Lunt, played by Lita Ward. I don't think this had ever been done before in a war movie.

Pattis and Davis are sort of reconciled and, somehow, both wind up in the same unit in the Pacific where Pattis has become both an officer and a pilot (beyond highly unlikely for a noncom who graduated aerial gunnery school).

The rest of the drama is predictable. "Aerial Gunner" offers hefty shots of patriotism and reminds all that Americans make great sacrifices at the front.

What truly enraged me, and I'm sure will infuriate other viewers, was the scene when a gunner calls out that Japanese Zeros were attacking and there immediately is shown a single-engine monoplane with FIXED landing gear. Is there an American kid today who doesn't know that the vaunted Mitsubishi fighter had retractable gear?

5/10 (but it does recapture a time in which movies made the war more immediate and, dare I say it, entertaining).