The Wings of Eagles is practically a remake of The Long Gray Line, or even a story reminiscent of Mister Roberts considering the sentiment for the military Ford repeats through each. It's movies like this that disrupts my joy for Ford, because it's just too damn patriotic. I think Ford fares better working with Westerns, where he can be just as patriotic but with a rougher edge. By virtue of the cowboy setting his characters are going to be angrier and a lot more vulnerable, but once he frames clean-cut soldiers in a sterile modern military environment, they're sort of dull.John Wayne plays Frank W. 'Spig' Wead, a Navy man at odds with a rival in the Army. The interactions between each ringleader and their posse is cartoonish. Their fights are staged under the whip of tight choreography: their fighting in one room leads them linearly into and across other rooms; a door opens and they fall into the obstacles that room has in store, in once instance a swimming pool. Scenes like these are funny, but they're taken out of time. The slapstick scenes are almost too clever for their own good, because it's too overwhelming to return to the droning military drama when they're over.
One point of interest, however, is the stock footage from Navy filmstrips and direct clips from his earlier military-sponsored film, The Battle of Midway.
The Wings of Eagles was made in cooperation with the U.S. Navy.
No comments:
Post a Comment