So time for a scintillating movie review. (The review being “scintillating”, that is. The movie, as will quickly become apparent, less so.)
Here is a list of things that the researchers, writers and producers of the movie “Flyboys” apparently discovered about the history of aerial combat in WWI that somehow escaped every other person on the face of the earth who chose to explore the subject, including the authors of a few first-person biographies, who were actual WWI pilots – Canadian Billy Bishop with “The Courage of the Early Morning”, American Eddie Rickenbacker with “Fighting the Flying Circus”, and the UK’s James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff’s’ “Falcons of France” leap immediately to mind, without even my touching the Google button. (As an aside, Hall and Nordhoff also penned a few other works, not about World War I but including this one for which they might even be better known than for “Falcons of France”.)
At this point, I’d warn “spoilers”, but that would be to suggest somehow that further spoiling is possible of something that already reminds the casual viewer of a picnic of cheese sandwiches and cooked chicken left for three weeks in the summer sun. In a metal box. So let me instead warn, “Lots of ‘Flyboys’ plot revelations follow.”
The War in the Air 1914 – 1918, as viewers of “Flyboys” saw it:
1. Apparently, the appearance of “Based on a true story” at the start of a movie can be as tenuous a link to the truth as, “There was a World War I; some people flew airplanes in it.”
2. After fledgling pilots receive just a few hours of rudimentary training – and that at the airdrome where they arrived having never so much as seen an aircraft outside of a flickering theatre newsreel – at the first announcement of an alert, fully a dozen or so of them are capable of leaping into their respective cockpits, launching themselves into the air in a squadron take-off -- all doing the same thing at the same time, and all the while maintaining a scant few feet of separation while climbing at precisely the same rate and angle of lift so as to arrive at their cruising altitude fully assembled in a beautifully constructed “V” formation.
3. Sitting behind a roaring seven-cylinder rotary engine, the pilot of an open-cockpit World War I aircraft can communicate perfectly well with another colleague in the air – in a separate airplane – simply by shouting at him.
4. The same German pilot who mercilessly machine guns a downed American pilot standing on the ground waving to signal that he is unhurt will shortly thereafter gallantly refuse to shoot down another American pilot who has failed to unjam his machine gun.
5. All that has to happen for large twin-engined World War I bombers to be devastatingly accurate with their vast quantities of wing-slung bombs is for their fighter escort to get them to their destination. At that point, they will release their bombs and not a single one will miss the target.
6. A typical young French woman during this period in history who lives a couple miles from the Western Front in a farmhouse while raising three young children apparently can readily find all the food they ever seem to need, all the while looking like a supermodel with fantastic teeth and a superb command of how to use (not to mention having a seemingly inexhaustible supply of) lipstick, eye shadow, shampoo, conditioner and a shape-enhancing peasant wardrobe.
7. An American pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille always has instant access to a two-seater airplane that he could commandeer in order to fly a few miles to visit the aforementioned French supermodel, and from there take her up for a pleasant joy ride while enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft gunners, always respectful of young love, leave them blissfully alone as they soar over lush green farmland curiously untouched by almost four years of trench warfare and literally millions of artillery explosions.
8. An entire German army advance, complete with several of the house-sized tanks of the day, will, as it draws progressively closer to the French supermodel’s farmhouse, only become audible to the supermodel when she happens to glance out her window and sees several hundred soldiers in field-grey uniforms and a half dozen land battleships moving across a field directly toward her. She will then resort to the supermodel’s first art of defence against an advancing enemy army. She will close the curtains.
9. The French captain of the Lafayette Escadrille will not only be aware of the American pilot’s frequent personal use of one of the squadron’s aircraft, he will winkingly give the American a medal when the American saves the lives of the French supermodel and the three children in her care with not one, but two, successful mercy flights. He will then admonish in a Pepé le Pew accent, “Zhus don’ do it agayn.”
10. After being pulled back from the brink of bleeding to death from an aircraft machine gun bullet wound, a young French supermodel will need only a few days in a World War I French city hospital to regain not only her previous peasant beauty (complete with lipstick, eye shadow, shampoo, conditioner and beautifully-mended, now-bloodstain-free wardrobe), but also the full use of her right arm.
11. After a bare few minutes skimming the pages of a handily-available French / English dictionary, a young French supermodel who previously could speak no more than a few rudimentary words of English (“Me prostitute not”) is capable of speaking not merely good English, but downright poetic English ([Saying good-bye]: “I will always keep you here [touches forehead], and here [touches heart].”)
12. A flimsy little WWI American airplane can suffer literally hundreds of canvas-perforating hits from German aircraft machine gun bullets and still manage to return to its home airdrome safely. A flimsy little WWI German airplane hit by a single American machine gun bullet, however, will immediately either explode in the air, or suffer the loss of an entire wing and plunge to the ground.
13. When an American pilot crash-lands upside-down in No Man’s Land, halfway between French and German trenches and after tumbling from his cockpit finds his hand trapped underneath part of his aircraft, despite (a) German riflemen and a machine gunner blazing away at him, (b) French riflemen blazing away at the Germans, (c) a second American pilot landing his own aircraft nearby on an apparently runway-smooth section of the Western Front, who then runs helmetless out into No Man’s Land beside the first wrecked aircraft, (d) the subsequent arrival of a French soldier who rushes forward from his own lines to help the second American try to lift the aircraft up, (e) the rather abrupt battlefield amputation of the first pilot’s trapped hand by one swipe from an entrenching tool, (f) the subsequent rush by the second American pilot back to the French lines carrying his wounded friend (now named Lefty) over his shoulder… despite all of this: the only person killed in the whole episode will be the luckless French soldier who rushed forward from his own lines. (Fortunately though, he will have had the presence of mind to have rushed forward carrying his entrenching tool-cum-scalpel.) Oh, and the originally wrecked aircraft will be blown to bits by shellfire just five seconds after the American pilot pulls his buddy Lefty to safety. Despite enemy gunners having had at least half an hour to try to find its range.
14. An American pilot is fully capable of flying and fighting an open-cockpit combat aircraft while using a hook where he used to have a hand.
15. In a whirling one-on-one dogfight with a master enemy ace, it is possible, through the simple expedient of “stepping on the brake” in mid-air and rolling over the top of your enemy, to draw your pistol from its holster and, with your very first shot, shoot your opponent right through the eye of his goggles.
16. American pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille won World War I’s war in the air all by themselves, with only the occasional bit of help from inept German pilots who occasionally crashed into each other while concentrating on trying to machine gun the same American plane.
= = =
One definition of “chutzpah” has it this way:
“(Yiddish) unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity” (Princeton WordNet)
Here’s another:
Alberta law enforcement officials recently erected a fence around a “controversial” and growing Edmonton “tent city” of homeless people that has been steadily growing on a patch of provincially owned land. The August 1 Globe and Mail said the settlement had “become an eyesore and a major headache for social agencies and local and provincial politicians”.
When interviewed about the new fence around his community that at last count consisted of some 70 tents and a population variously between 100 – 200, with at least one brothel under canvas (now closed), the tent city’s “mayor” Dean Cardinal said the fence is, in fact, a welcome addition: “’Hopefully it will keep out the riff-raff,’ the 50-year old man, wearing white gloves, said as he picked up garbage off the dead grass.”
Like I said, chutzpah.
One hopes that the Alberta authorities don’t have among them a Douglas MacArthur fan.
À la prochaine.
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