It’s a war movie!
I’ve seen some spy stuff during this blog series, but very few out-and-out war movies. And it’s by Howard Hawks, so it looks like the shots are gorgeous…
Except that the transfer I have i ridiculous. There’s digital artefacts all over the place. Not just banding and exaggerated grains, but also a harsh mp3 audio track.
It basically looks like they mastered it off of a VCD disc downloaded from a 1998 torrent site.
Very not pleasant.
Anyway, this won the Oscar for Best Film Editing, which is, I guess, a way for people to say “this movie wasn’t very good, but we appreciate the effort”.
Because this is an odd movie. We follow a crew flying around the Pacific for hours. So lots of tight shots inside a plane, and then composited above documentary footage of locations.
Ah… it had a difficult production. I guess that explains the weirdnesses.
But I don’t know whether my general dissatisfaction with this movie is due to the bad DVD or whether the movie is just kind of boring. It’s 95% character development.
Air Force. Howard Hawks. 1943.
Popular movies in February 1943 according to IMDB:
| Poster | Votes | Rating | Movie |
|---|---|---|---|
 | 2340 | 7.1 | Air Force |
 | 491 | 7.1 | Kid Dynamite |
 | 241 | 6.9 | Claudia |
 | 246 | 6.7 | Reveille with Beverly |
 | 265 | 6.1 | The Youngest Profession |
 | 3090 | 5.5 | The Outlaw |
 | 949 | 4.6 | Dead Men Walk |
This blog post is part of the Decade series.