EAGLE SQUADRON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 176, 6 November 1942, Page 13

EAGLE SQUADRON

(Wanger-Universal)

‘THIS is not a very good film, but certainly it is not a bad one either. It is somewhere between the two. And it is best, to my mind,

when it is trying to do a straight documentary job of recording what life (and death) is like to American pilots attached to the R.A.F. in England. Then it has some of the honesty and authenticity of The Next of Kin which, as I

mentioned the other week, comes closest of any production I have so far seen to the ideal of what a war film should be. It has also some very exciting photography of aerial combat. But Hollywood keeps on getting in the way with its formula of contrived situations and copybook heroism and romance. Why is it, I wonder, that characters in the average war film must nearly always talk like a mixture of Winston Churchill, Quentin Reynolds, and Dorothy Thompson? There’s a terrific amount of this kind of ‘speech-making in Eagle Squadron. The English characters — notably’ Squadron-Leader John Loder and the Waaf-waisted heroine, Diana Barrymore-do it in voices practically choked with English phlegm, whereas the Americans-the boys of the Eagle Squadron-are as emotional as the others are tight-lipped. That’s part of the film’s theme: the way in which the Americans misunderstand the apparently callous understatement of the English. But in both cases the burden of the speech-making is the same, though I refuse to believe that the average Briton or American, caught in a tight corner, would deliver himself of an oration on the set subject of "What Democracy Means to Me" as glibly as these people do. The trouble is, I suppose, that Hollywood has made them talk like this so often that Hollywood is now afraid the public may feel itself cheated if characters talk normally when the bombs begin to fall, or the gatling jams. Similarly, I am not convinced that in other respects besides dialogue this film is an accurate picture either of the Eagle Squadron or of England. Still, the interests of the story must be served, and these interests demand that the American hero (Robert Stack) shall eventually be decorated for defying incredible odds and bringing a_ secret variety of German fighter-plane successfully back to England following a commando raid on France; that his Squad-ton-Leader shall be killed and so leave the hero free to marry the girl ("Great girl, Ann!"); and that she in turn shall win a medal for having rescued blind patients from a bombed hospital while nurses, firemen, and other civil defence workers are conspicuous by their absence. But you, who after all are not so concerned as the critic with what a film might be like, will probably find the false notes ringing less loudly in your ears. As a criterion of entertainment, I suggest that you might’ use A Yank in the R.A.F.-if you enjoyed that you should enjoy this. You will, I think, like Diana Barrymore (John’s daughter). It is too early yet to talk about a chip off the old block, but the family likeness and the family quality are there.