Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

blanche-2 Robert Taylor plays a flier assigned to the famous "Hell Cats" in "Flight Command" from 1940. Taylor plays Alan Drake, who excitedly joins the Hell Cats and then realizes he has a lot to learn from his commander, Billy Gary (Walter Pidgeon) - Alan met Billy's wife Lorna when he landed off-course en route to join the Hell Cats. Though he feels left out by the guys, he finds acceptance at a party given at Billy's and Lorna's (Ruth Hussey) house and blends in well. He helps Billy's brother-in-law Jerry (Shepperd Strudwick) with a device he's working on that allows one to fly in the fog; unfortunately, Jerry is killed testing the device, leaving his sister Lorna devastated.While Billy is out of town, Alan does what he can to cheer Lorna up. She starts to fall for him, and in a panic, she leaves Billy. The Hell Cats assume that Alan is having an affair with her and turn on him.Pretty routine with some wonderful flying sequences and some lovely performances, particularly from Pidgeon and Hussey. Strudwick, a young man here, was a Broadway actor who went on to continue on Broadway and also prime time television and soap operas, best remembered as Victor Lord in One Life to Live. He gives an energetic performance.Taylor is handsome and debonair and does a good job as Alan. He was a solid actor, not given to introspection, and capable of better work than he was often given. He loved being at MGM, took the pathetic money the studio gave him (he was supposedly the lowest paid contract player in history), and played whatever parts he was handed. The parts got better after the war. We lost so many of these leading men way too young, thanks to the habit of smoking. Taylor was a three-pack-a-day man who died at the age of 57.Pretty good, nice performances, great effects for 1940.

Neil Doyle ROBERT TAYLOR plays a cocky air cadet who must prove to his commander and teammates that he's really a good guy when their perception of him is unclear due to a few plot circumstances.WALTER PIDGEON plays the commander with his usual poise and elegance, smoothly mature as the husband of RUTH HUSSEY. Hussey has never had a better share of close-ups but her role is really peripheral to the main story of camaraderie among the men.Frank Borzage has directed with a good eye for the aerial sequences during the period just before WWII. Carriers with planes landing on them and various formations while on maneuvers are all well photographed and realistically presented.Taylor gives an admirable performance in the kind of role that would have gone to John Payne if the film had been made at Fox. His subtle awareness of how the men perceive him (after a misunderstanding) shows that he was capable of being more than just a pretty face.Although well done and enjoyable to watch, the script prevents it from being anything more than a routine aerial film with some nice touches.

bkoganbing Aviation buffs will love Flight Command. The special effects are outstanding for 1940, very much like Howard Hughes's classic Hell's Angels. If this were made at 20th Century Fox, Tyrone Power would have been cast as the lead. Power had a patent on hero/heel types over at that studio. Robert Taylor who plays the lead here usually played straight up heroes in his films. Taylor played hero/heels, but not as often as Power did. Taylor debuted in that kind of part at MGM with A Yank at Oxford and wouldn't play one again until his classic Johnny Eager.Taylor is a wiseacre fresh naval cadet straight out of the flying school at Pensacola, hence the nickname the others give him. Because of deaths an opening occurs at the elite Hellcats fighter squadron and Taylor is brash enough to think they requested him personally. His attitude doesn't make him too many friends, among them being the squadron leader Walter Pigeon, his wife Ruth Hussey, and her brother Sheppard Strudwick. Strudwick is working on an instrument that will enable planes to land in fog, but gets killed trying to test fly it.That opens all kinds of complications and misunderstandings among the men of the squadron and Taylor gets to feel mighty unwelcome. But he gets a chance to redeem himself in the end.A few days earlier I did a review of another aviation picture Ceiling Zero and commented how Warner Brothers played on the cheap with the special effects. MGM did just the opposite, Flight Command got two Oscar nominations for visual special effects and sound, both well deserved.Carrier based aircraft was still an unproven tactic for war, although aircraft carriers had been developed since the early twenties. But it hadn't yet been shown to be effective in war. It's almost quaint to watch the cast using ancient World War I era biplanes as training vehicles. But that's what the United States Navy had available back then. It was two years until the battle of Midway and less than two years until Pearl Harbor when Flight Command came out. A whole lot of aviation progress was made in that period, it had to be.Flight Command out of necessity has to be dated, but it is still a good film to watch bearing in mind what these men were training for.

dexter-10 Ens. Alan Drake (Robert Taylor) is a naval air cadet assigned to one of the U.S. Navy's most elite flying squadrons. In the face of personal problems and social conflicts, can he make the grade?