'Pearl Harbour' holds a special place somewhere or other for me. It is the only war-ie aeroplane (or should that be 'airplane'?) movie I have ever sat down to and given up five minutes into the battle scenes, which were so badly CGI-ed, they were almost as bad as the Godawful script and appallingly shallow characterisations.
I thought I might put up with it for a while if I could get a few more long lingering looks at young Kate in her overtight nurse's uniform or that great floral number she wore in the movie trailer, but the rest of the movie was so bad, I even 'forewent' that pleasure. The DVD has sat, unwatched and never likely to be watched, somewhere on my shelf since then.
How
did the movie end - can I assume the bloke with the ten thousand hour 'bash' in his hat and the Rayban sunglasses shot down so many Japanese aircraft with the endless supply of .50 cal his trusty P40 was carrying that we now know why the Japanese cancelled their second wave - there simply weren't enough aircraft got back to the carriers to mount the second raid?
There may be a worse aviation war-ie flick out there somewhere -
(Did Erroyl Flynn ever do a flying war-ie? God, I hope not.) - but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one.
Best? I haven't given it a lot of thought, but given how soon after the war it was made, and how the producers still needed to tread lightly on the sensitivities of many wartime USAAF people who were still around, I thought the Yanks did an admirable job with Gregory Peck's
'12 O'Clock High'.
Both probably wouldn't translate well to film, but I'd love to see someone make an attempt to make a film of Len Deighton's (fictional)
'Bomber', and perhaps even moreso, John Beede's true to life
'They Hosed Them Out', a warts and all story of the life of an RAF tail gunner.
(Do yourself an enormous favour and get your hands on the book - It's recently been re-released under the new title, 'Rear Gunner'. http://www.biblioz.com/main.php?acti...76679&record=2 Written in the early 1950's, it ain't a pretty picture of the RAF that he paints.)