Dive Bomber (1941)
Directed by Michael Curtiz

Plot Summary: A new flight surgeon and a Navy pilot overcome personal differences to work on solving the problem of Altitude Sickness which causes blackouts at high altitude.

The real stars of the film are the pre-World War II navy aircraft featured in full colour.

I really enjoyed this beautifully photographed pre WW II movie. At 133 minutes in length it is pretty long but, so fast paced that the time goes by quickly. There seems to be great chemistry between all of the actors. Sterling performances are the order of the day by Flynn, MacMurray, Toomey and Bellamy as the leads. Add to that, good secondary performances by the large cast and it adds up to one fine film. The air sequences are vivid with detail and the colour photography is outstanding. In a bit of irony, at one point Flynn is assigned to duty on the USS Saratoga in Pearl Harbour but his orders are changed. Since this movie was filmed and released just prior to December 7th, 1941 it seems almost clairvoyant. Lastly, I must comment on a ridiculous bit of nonsense concerning the character played by Allen Jenkins as he tries to evade his wife.This bit was totally unnecessary and did nothing but detract from the story. What is really unexcusable is that they performed this bit on three occasions (talk about overkill). But, the rest of the movie was far too superb to allow this one bad bit to mar the overall enjoyment.

Taken by itself, DIVE BOMBER is a routine tale of the efforts of Navy doctors to find solutions to major issues facing aviators (countering the effect of G-force on pilots, and functioning in a high altitude environment), The story and screen play were written by Naval aviator Frank ('Spig') Wead who would, himself, be the subject of a later film, John Ford's THE WINGS OF EAGLES), photographed in glorious Technicolour, and teaming top WB 'draw' Errol Flynn with two legendary actors, Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy. Filmed at the eve of the war, the film was one of many military-themed pictures Hollywood's studios were producing, to generate public acceptance of an inevitable U.S. involvement.

While the movie was successful when released, the passage of time has dated it, and the issues addressed; as a result, DIVE BOMBER has not retained the luster of Flynn's swashbucklers. But in the seventies, the film took on a new significance, as allegations were made that Flynn had committed treason, working for the Nazis at the time of the shooting.

According to 'secret' documents that an author said were made available to him, Flynn aided two known Nazi agents, helping them perform espionage by demanding DIVE BOMBER be shot 'on location' at Pensacola Naval Air Station. While the spies were arrested and deported, Flynn went unpunished, and his participation 'covered up', for morale reasons. The revelations were published in a Flynn biography, and the actor's already tarnished reputation became the butt of a new round of derision (a thinly-veiled version of Flynn served as the Nazi villain of the 1991 film, THE ROCKETEER).

Many of Flynn's surviving co-stars, and his official biographer, Tony Thomas, came to the long-dead actor's defence, and research into the extensive, now declassified file the FBI kept on the rowdy actor (files were kept on virtually everyone of importance in the entertainment industry) reveal no more than a social involvement with the agents (the pair socialized with many 'movers' in the film industry, and Flynn was a major 'party animal' in the forties). The idea that the actor could have 'demanded' and gotten a location to be used would have been unlikely (the studio carefully budgeted each film, and actors were only rarely involved in the production end). Had the charges been true, no studio would have ever hired Flynn, again (this was a very patriotic period), and Jack Warner would have PAID, if necessary, for Flynn's one-way ticket to Germany!

Despite the lack of any real evidence, there are still people who cling to the belief that Errol Flynn was guilty (he was far from the noble cavalier that many of his early films portrayed him as, and his critics would love to add treason to his long list of sins). DIVE BOMBER has become the cornerstone of one of Hollywood's great mysteries...

The same year Michael Curtiz directed Dive Bomber he also directed one of the all time movie greats....Casablanca. "Here's looking at you kid."

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