FORGOTTEN GEM? Lafayette Escadrille (1958)

                    “Lafayette Escadrille” was supposed to be William Wellman’s (“Wings”) homage to the unit he was a member of in WWI.  The Lafayette Escadrille consisted of American’s who volunteered to fight for France before the U.S. entered the war.  Wellman, who started out in the French Foreign Legion and switched to the flying unit, was credited with three kills and was awarded with the Croix de Guerre.  He was shot down and survived the crash landing, but walked with a limp the rest of his life.  He wrote the story the movie was inspired by.  It was based on his experiences.  Several characters in the film are based on members of Wellman’s squadron.  The main character was a friend of his who kicked out of the unit for hitting a French officer.  He became a pimp and fell in love with one of his prostitutes.  He met Gen. Pershing and talked his way into the Air Service.  (In the movie, Thad Walker escorts a general to a brothel.  This was based on an experience Wellman had involving Pershing during the war.)  He was shot down and killed, his wife jumped into the Seine.  This was ending Wellman shot, but Jack Warner and Warner Brothers decided the film needed an upbeat ending so the studio took the film away from Wellman and reshot the ending.  It also changed the title. Wellman intended for the movie to be entitled “C’est la Guerre”.  He also intended for Paul Newman to play the lead with Clint Eastwood as his pal.  Newman became unavailable and the studio insisted on teen idol Tab Hunter and bumped Eastwood down to a minor role in favor of David Janssen.  You can’t have a teen idol die.  The studio was not interested in making the film and insisted Wellman make “Darby's Rangers” to get the greenlight.  And then it saddled Wellman with a low budget.  Wellman was so pissed by the whole experience that he gave up making movies.

                    The movie opens with Wellman narrating as the Lafayette Escadrille memorial fills the screen.  He proclaims that this will be the story of a man whose name is not on the memorial.  Flashback to Thad Walker (Hunter) stealing a car and hitting a kid on a bike.  He escapes only to have his father slap him around.  Next thing we know, he’s a stowaway on a ship to France.  He hooks up with a trio of Americans that includes William Wellman (played by his son William, Jr.) and decides to join them in enlisting in the Lafayette Escadrille.  Before that, he locks eyes with a girl in  a bar and it’s love at first sight (probably due to the sappy romantic music).  Renee (Etchika Choureau) is a whore with a heart of gold.  At the barracks, the narrator identifies Walker’s bunkmates (one of whom is a very young Eastwood) and proceeds to tell us most of them are going to die.  Hey, spoiler alert!  They are trained on a French monoplane by a French pilot who only speaks French.  No wonder so many die.  (In fact, the French speak without subtitles, as though the movie is a serious work of art.)  The training montage features silly comic relief with silly music.   Walker ends up going AWOL after slugging a French officer.  He shacks up with Renee.  This dude is in desperate need of redemption and we’ve been promised some dogfighting, so you know where this is heading.

                   

                    It’s hard to assign blame for this fiasco.  Wellman basically disowned the movie, so obviously he blamed the studio for the final product.  But even if you factor in the low budget and the amended ending, he controlled the story for the most part.  He accepted the poor performances by the actors.  Tab Hunter is no Paul Newman.  He created the insipid romance.  He vetted the terrible soundtrack and the silly, slapstick humor.  The humor is absolutely painful to watch, especially in the 21^st Century.   Wellman is the one who decided to honor his unit by focusing on a character who is a jerk and did not deserve redemption.  It must have been heartbreaking to have most of his fellow fliers criticize the film, but at least he could argue it was not his fault.

                    There have been some good dogfighting films set in WWI.  It almost deserves its own subgenre.  In 1958 (actually the movie was finished in 1956, but the studio held its release in anticipation of Hunter’s anticipated music stardom), it was gutsy to come out with a movie to challenge Wellman’s own “Wings”, but also “Hell's Angels”, and “The Dawn Patrol”.  In fact, “Lafayette Escadrille” marks the last of the old-style WWI air combat films.  You would expect that the last of the old-school would go out with a lot of dogfighting and you would be wrong.  Nobody fires a tracer until the 1:24 mark and ends with a total of three minutes of forgettable action.  The next significant film in the subgenre was “The Blue Max”.  Talk about a huge jump!  There is not a single pratfall in “The Blue Max”.

GRADE  =  F