Ace of Aces (1933)

 

                   Remember when Richard Dix was a big star?  Good, because you would have to be dead.  Dix was a star in the 1930’s.  He was nominated for Best Actor in 1931 for “Cimarron”.  He had a good career, but is largely forgotten.  He stars in “Ace of Aces”, otherwise known as “Bird of Prey” which is the name of the story it was based on.  The story was written by John Monk Saunders.  Saunders was motivated to write aviation stories due to being stuck in Florida during WWI as a flight instructor.  Failing to get to the big show haunted him the rest of his life.  He also wrote the story for “The Dawn Patrol” (1930).  It was entitled “The Flight Commander” and won his a Best Story Oscar.  Another of his stories became “The Eagle and the Hawk”.  “Ace of Aces” was directed by J. Walter Ruben and he had access to a nice fleet of planes, including some French Nieuports.  Despite this, the film used some footage from “Hell’s Angels”.                 

                   The movie starts off poorly with two love-birds cooing on a bench.  Rocky (Dix) and Nancy (Elizabeth Allan) are engaged to be married and will live happily ever after.  He is a sculptor who works while wearing a suit and tie.  Then along comes the pesky Great War.  Rocky sneers at the lemmings who are willing to enlist and jump off a cliff.  He is a confirmed pacifist, but can’t convince Nancy it’s a matter of principle.  Rocky:  “It’s cute when you salute the flag.”  Nancy:  “You’re as yellow as this piece of chalk.”   She brands him a coward and goes off to become a nurse on the Western Front.  What’s a macho leading man to do?   Did someone call for redemption?  Before you can flash a white feather, Rocky is suddenly in a barracks in France.  He’s a lieutenant!   Did the movie cut half an hour or did sculptors enter as officers?  The unit has a monkey and a lion (an homage to Lufbery’s Lafayette Escadrille).  Rocky still believes thou shalt not kill, until a German wounds him.  It’s on now!  Suddenly he loves killing and is determined to become the leading ace (hence the title of the movie).  He invents attacking from the sun.  That’s how great he is.  He becomes a pompous ass and when reunited with Nancy, he insists she do her “duty” while he is on leave in Paris.

                   There is a subgenre of WWI air combat movies.  Some are quite good and took advantage of the availability of vintage aircraft.  Movies like “Hell’s Angels” and “The Dawn Patrol” set high standards, but inspired some low quality imitators.  “Ace of Aces” is in the bottom half of the subgenre.   It is a misfire from the opening scene.  Dix was too old for the role and his character is dislikeable.   Rocky is also inconsistent, whiplashing between pacifism and jingoism.  His character arc makes little sense except in a cinematically contrived way.  It does not help that Dix is a poor actor, at least for modern tastes.  Allan is equally bad and has a similarly flawed character.  Nancy starts as a patriotic role model for American women and then becomes the woman who goes to bed because a man tells her its her duty.  So much for feminism in 1933. 

                   The movie is laden with the clichés that abound in the subgenre.  The pilot Rocky evinces the devil may care of cinematic fighter pilots.  He is the pilot obsessed with kills who loses his humanity.  He’s a loner who shows no emotion when mates are lost.   He and the other pilots are heavy drinkers.  Hell, the monkey is an alcoholic!  The movie might have been saved by the combat sequences, but those are poorly rendered and only make up about five minutes of the film.  And the movie is infuriatingly disrespectful of its audience.  The movie came out only fifteen years after Eddie Richenbacker became America’s ace of aces with 26 victories.  And yet, in the movie, Rocky shoots down 42 planes!  Most adult audience members would have known the 26 figure like they knew Babe Ruth’s 60.  They were expected to believe Rocky was a much better ace than Eddie Rickenbacker?  Give me a break!

                   “Ace of Aces” is not the worst WWI aviation film.  That honor goes to “Lafayette Escadrille”.  However, it is certainly one of the worst.  It makes “Flyboys” look like a classic.

 

GRADE  =  D

The 24th (2020)

 

            “The 24^th” is a motion picture about the infamous Houston Riot of 1917. It was directed and co-written by Kevin Willmot who also wrote the screenplay for “Da 5 Bloods”.  It started with the 24^th Regiment, an all-black unit led by white officers, arrives outside Houston to guard the construction of a training camp. A camp that will train white soldiers before they go to the Western Front in France. The men of the 24^th want to go also, but the Army does not plan on putting them in combat. Their commanding officer, Col. Norton (Thomas Haden Church) is not a bigot and it has hit the ceiling in his career and his hopes for combat because he is loyal to his men. His second in command represents the majority of white officers who commanded black units in WWI and WWII. The movie focuses on a few of the blacks, especially Corporal Boston (Trai Byers). He is more intelligent than his peers and Norton urges him to go to officer training. Boston has a bad relationship with Private Walker (Mo McRae) who considers him to be an Uncle Tom and who resents his intelligence. Their relationship reminds of Searles and Trip in “Glory” with Norton resembling  Col. Shaw. The unit’s sergeant is named Hayes (Mykelti Williamson) is a lifer who has given up on the Army treating blacks well.

            Almost as soon as they get to the camp, they are harassed by the white construction workers who are led by a flaming racist. Boston tries the “you are talking to an American soldier” route which is met with jeers. You may be wearing a uniform, but you still are a n-word. He gets beaten when he refuses to give up his seat on a train. “Jim Crow is the law here.” When the white racist kills a black man, the local sheriff lets him out of jail.  Nortan is sympathetic, but he can’t change the system. And then he reluctantly agrees to a promotion to a white unit heading for France. The new commander, his exec Major Lockhart, is a bigot. With Norton gone, things spiral out of control. When a rumor hits the camp that a soldier was killed by cops and Boston is in jail, the blacks arm themselves. Sgt. Hayes changes his tune and leads the men into Houston because they are fed up with the treatment. This results in the killing of some police and civilians. The movie concludes with the court martial.

            “The 24^th” is a low budget movie that sincerely wants to bring a forgotten event in American History to the screen. Most Americans are not aware of the riot which resulted in the largest murder trial in the history of the Army. The 369^th Infantry Regiment (the Harlem Hellfighters) has gotten good coverage as the most famous unit to fight in the trenches. It was loaned to the French army because Gen. Pershing did not have confidence in black troops. That discrimination was slight compared to what black soldiers faced in the U.S. if they were stationed in the South. “The 24^th” has some truly despicable whites, but when I attempt to describe them as cartoonish villains, I have to remind myself that there were people like that. When black soldiers were treated like scum in spite of serving their country, you wonder what took them so long to snap. You will root for them to get payback, but the movie accurately portrays their actions as murder.

            The characters are all stereotypes, but the cast is decent. The focus on Boston was wise and his romance with a black woman feels real. Not surprisingly, there is a love triangle involving Walker. Church is the big star in the cast and his character is appealing as the rare white officer who treats his men as equals. The film has the feel of a Hallmark movie and the sincerity can be a bit cloying, but as a history lesson is has a lot to offer. As you can see below, it is an accurate depiction of the mutiny and although the scenes before that are probably fictional, it does a good job of showing why the soldiers were provoked. And I have to credit the movie with not justifying what the soldiers did that night. It was murder and not justified, but understandable.

GRADE = C

HISTORICAL ACCURACY:  The film is admirably accurate. The riot is also known as the Camp Logan Mutiny, which fits because that is what the soldiers did. The unit was actually the 3^rd Battalion of the 24^th Infantry Regiment (one of the original all-black units created for the Indian Wars, hence the name Buffalo Soldiers). The treatment they received from the white community and especially the all-white Houston Police Department is accurate. Most of the main characters are real, but with the names changed. On August 23, 1917, policemen Lee Sparks and Rufus Daniels fired shots to break up a peaceful crowd in a black neighborhood. When the blacks fled, Sparks chased and ended up breaking into a home where he found a black woman. He pulled her out of the house to arrest her. Private Alonzo Edwards intervened and offered to take custody of the woman. He was pistol-whipped and arrested. Later that day, Corporal Charles Baltimore (obviously Boston in the movie) approached Sparks to ask about Edwards, he was hit by Sparks’ pistol and ran with shots chasing him. He was found hiding under a bed and taken to jail. At the camp, rumor spread that Baltimore had been killed. His comrades were in the process of arming themselves when a white officer arrived with Baltimore. Maj. Snow assembled the men and warned them about taking action that they would regret. One of the men had a rifle hidden and he fired a shot and yelled that there was a white mob shooting at them. The blacks mutinied and armed themselves. 155 men, led by a Sgt. Vida Henry, marched into Houston. They fired at any houses with lights on. They fired at cars. The HPD cops were poorly organized and outgunned so encounters led to the deaths of 5 policemen. Things turned when some of the blacks fired on a car killing a National Guard officer. This caused the soldiers to realize they had crossed a line. They went back to the camp. Outside the camp, Henry committed suicide. The men turned themselves in. The movie was correct that 63 soldiers were charged with murder and 58 were found guilty. 41 were given life with hard labor and 13 were hanged, including Baltimore.

 

Shoulder Arms (1918)

 

                        Charlie Chaplin made what is considered the first war comedy.  He wrote, directed, and produced.  It was released after Armistice Day.  The movie was a big hit and is considered a classic in the war comedy subgenre.  It clocks in at 36 minutes. 

                        Charlie arrives on the Western Front and is assigned to the “awkward squad”.  What follows is the iconic drill scene with the slapstick and Chaplin’s pigeon-toes marching.  This sets the stage for lot of sight gags and low brow humor.  Charlie has a mouse-trap as a necklace.  He scratches his back using a cheese grater hanging on the wall.  He gets some limburger cheese from home and eats it wearing a gas mask.  It rains so much (the password is:  “It’s wet”) that his bunk is under water, while he is sleeping.  He lights a cigarette by holding it over the parapet for a bullet to light it.  His unit goes over the top and captures a German trench.  He goes on a mission disguised as a tree.  He ends up capturing the Kaiser. It’s that kind of movie.

                        The movie has been described as a realistic take on soldier life in the Great War.  I would not go that far. The trenches are surprisingly authentic.  The jokes about soldier life must have struck home with veterans.  Chaplin was already a favorite of theirs and this movie certainly was a hit with the men who had been in the trenches.  The humor holds up well, but the movie weakens in the second half when Charlie is behind enemy lines and it gets more serious.  Still, overall it is a must-see movie.

GRADE  =  B