DIVE BOMBER (Warner Bros. 1941) Warner Home Video

Michael Curtiz’s Dive Bomber (1941) attempts to serve double duty. On one front as a sort of ‘how-to’ documentary made with the full cooperation of the Naval Air Corps, and on another, as a somewhat sloppily executed melodrama in which the usually dependable Errol Flynn is miscast as Lt. Douglas Lee – a surgeon who spends the bulk of the story selflessly devoted to aviation medicine. Despite these narrative misgivings, the picture was a huge hit for Warner Bros. It also marked the final collaboration between Curtiz and Flynn, begun on 1935’s Captain Blood and running its course with 12 movies to their credit. Uniquely, Dive Bomber would take the war – usually a B&W affair – and translate it into blazing Technicolor, documenting some pre-war aerial maneuvers, seamlessly blended into the war-themed story by Frank Wead and Robert Buckner; also, to show off the USS Enterprise, then, one of the best-known aircraft carriers in the military arsenal. The movie, characterized as ‘Warner's tribute to the pre-Pearl Harbor U.S. Navy’ was actually based on an original story by Commander Frank Wead.

Upon the first reading of the proposed script, initially entitled ‘Beyond the Blue Sky’, the Department of the Navy, eager to capitalize on the movie as a propaganda tool for enlistment, lent its full support to the production. Alas, by the time the movie was ready to go before the cameras, healthily budgeted at $1.7 million, the War Department was on high alert, straining its investment of nearly 1,000 fighting men, along with access to some of its most top-secret facilities. And the picture’s incubation was anything but smooth. For starters, Warner announced in the trades in 1940 it intended to star, James Cagney, George Brent and Ronald Reagan, with resident warhorse, Lloyd Bacon in the director's chair. However, as the screenplay mutated the focus shifted to a starring vehicle for Flynn and a reunion effort with Curtiz at the helm. But the production became bogged down in almost daily conflicts between Curtiz and Flynn, the latter, unimpressed by Curtiz’s willingness to gamble on the safety of his cast and crew, merely to get in his prerequisite shots. At the start of shooting the pair were none too fond of one another. By the end, neither was on speaking terms.

Borrowing Fred MacMurray from Paramount Studios (in exchanged for Olivia de Havilland’s participation on 1941’s Hold Back the Dawn), Dive Bomber also brought Warner contract player, Alexis Smith to the forefront in her first real co-starring role. Despite its documentary approach, the adventuresome antics depicted in Dive Bomber have no equivalent in reality. For his efforts, reconciling color footage of aerial dogfights staged without the benefit of Hollywood as their wingman, with the Technicolor drama unfolding mostly on sound stages at the studio, cinematographer, Bert Glennon was justly honored with an Oscar nod. But the production was plagued by numerous delays, including the navy’s decision to repaint its entire fleet in camouflage gray after key scenes had already been shot in Technicolor, celebrating the more prominent pre-war color scheme. And although aerial stunt pilot extraordinaire, Paul Mantz received screen credit for the stunts in Dive Bomber, a previous injury forced him out of the running, the real flying left to Frank Clarke, with Mantz overseeing the planned maneuvers from the ground. Indeed, Errol Flynn never saw the inside of a plane either, despite having his pilot’s license.  Meanwhile, the heft of the Technicolor cameras necessitated special rigging constructed for their support in order to capture additional aerial footage. In fact, very little aerial highlights depicted in the movie is owed to models and blue-screen, with actual Vought SB2U Vindicators and Douglas TBD Devastators shown off to their best advantage.

Dive Bomber’s plot takes off thus: Lt. Cmdr. Joe Blake (Fred MacMurray) is, at first, a skeptic of Lt. Douglas Lee’s methodology. He knows the real reason for Lee’s passion – that once, he botched an operation on a pilot who died on his table. However, Blake sets aside personal difference to understand Lee’s investigation of the phenomenon of pilot blackouts induced by G-force during dive bombing. In a cross between Dr. Kildare and Mrs. Miniver, Flynn becomes the Florence Nightingale of the air force, a gifted physician whose commitment to flyers is unrequited – since Flynn never does make it into a plane himself. The Wead/Buckner screenplay periodically tosses aside this aerial scenario for maneuvers a little closer to home, with Lee falling hard for Mrs. Linda Fisher (Alexis Smith). But theirs is a troubled and stultified affair, mercifully to take a proverbial backseat to the spectacular aerial acrobatics. Dive Bomber is an inconsistent entertainment at best. It’s passable because of Flynn, but not terribly engaging, even as war-time propaganda. Occasionally, there are sequences of daring excitement. But, on the whole, the film is a real ‘crash and burn’ long before anyone’s wings have been clipped.

Warner Home Video’s DVD is, in a word – atrocious! The Technicolor is grossly unbalanced throughout and severely mis-registered during many sequences, resulting in a soft blurry image with very distracting halos. Flesh tones are garishly pink and pasty. Contrast is all over the place, toggling from relatively solid to anemic, with blacks registering as more of a soft gray and whites as a dull gray. Worse – there is a litany of built-in dirt, scratches and other age-related anomalies that, at times, are quite distracting. The audio is Dolby Digital 1.0 mono and adequately rendered. The only extra is a brief featurette on the making of the film. Not recommended.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

2

EXTRAS

2