Howard Hawk's Academy Award-winning first talkie focuses on a group of fighter pilots in World War I. Like another prominent movie about World War I released in 1930 - Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front" - this is an anti-war movie, focusing on the futility of war. The plot involves the leader of a squadron who defies his commanding officer.
I understand that most of the war movies released in the early '30s were anti-war. People simply remembered that World War I changed nothing significant, merely killing millions of young men senselessly and leaving a lost generation. Attitudes probably would've stayed such had another global war not come about (never mind that World War I set the stage for World War II, with the reparations on Germany leading to Hitler's rise to power; on top of that, Woodrow Wilson's refusal to listen to a young Ho Chi Minh set the stage for the Vietnam War).
Anyway, not a masterpiece but worth seeing.
I understand that most of the war movies released in the early '30s were anti-war. People simply remembered that World War I changed nothing significant, merely killing millions of young men senselessly and leaving a lost generation. Attitudes probably would've stayed such had another global war not come about (never mind that World War I set the stage for World War II, with the reparations on Germany leading to Hitler's rise to power; on top of that, Woodrow Wilson's refusal to listen to a young Ho Chi Minh set the stage for the Vietnam War).
Anyway, not a masterpiece but worth seeing.