Saturday, June 4, 2011

WWII Marathon #5: A Yank in the RAF (1941)

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This bland, distasteful WWII quasi-love triangle is tonally akin to a sawed-off shotgun. It’s a veritable, highly inaccurate scatter-shot of ingredients errantly tragic, comedic and romantic, with a central cast of nearly insufferable, bewildering characters who appear more like wartime pin-ups than actual people.
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Henry King, who directed nearly every top-level action film at 20th Century Fox (be it pleasant or miserable) for nearly two decades, is hopelessly disadvantaged with this material, but his set-pieces (excluding a moderately watchable climactic dogfight) are equally haphazard.
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Tyrone Power plays the titular Yankee R.A.F. pilot, a woefully ignorant, slimy and loutish brute who has followed and inevitably ensnared a beautiful nightclub singer and dancer (Betty Grable) who is also entertaining the virtuous charm of a British captain who, coincidentally, finds himself in the same flight crew as our irritant anti-hero.
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Power is intolerably smug and conceited while Grable is adorably puzzling and the film, to its greatest disservice, never makes us feel for either one of them. The aforementioned dogfight which punctuates the film is more desperate than stirring, and by its conclusion, A Yank in the R.A.F. has utterly lost its sense of direction – a prolonged, inescapable nosedive. [D+]

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