Eagle Squadron ** (1942, Robert Stack, Diana Barrymore, Jon Hall, Eddie Albert, John Loder, Nigel Bruce, Leif Erickson) – Classic Movie Review 10,673

Sparks fly when Americans enter Britain’s Royal Air Force in director Arthur Lubin’s simplistic and dramatically unrealistic 1942 World War Two airborne action war film Eagle Squadron, which blends fictional and real-life events and fails to hit the target.

However, it is interesting as a fictional tale of American pilots going to war in the Royal Air Force Eagle Squadrons. Robert Stack and Leif Erickson lead the manly way as Chuck S Brewer and Wadislaw Borowsky, who cross the Atlantic to join the RAF and are assigned to the Eagle Squadron made up of other American pilots, while Diana Barrymore and Evelyn Ankers provide the love interest as woman flyers Anne Partridge and Nancy Mitchell.

The impressive flying photography by Ernest B Schoedsack and Harry Watt, is the highlight, bringing a sharp touch of realism, while the stalwart cast members do their darnedest, though Norman Reilly Raine’s weighty, rather ponderous screenplay, based on a story by C S Forester that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, holds it down.

The film began as a documentary on real Eagle Squadron pilots, with co-operation with the British Ministry of Information which provided actual aerial combat footage. Although the documentary project was fraught with many problems and finally not possible, the footage shot could be recycled for a new feature film.

Reportedly the fictional story was Raine’s idea, inspired by media reports of the fighting in the Battle of Britain, in particular, the American pilots who volunteered before the US entered World War Two, to fly for the RAF. Raine sold it to producer Walter Wanger, who hired Forester to turn it into a magazine story.

Filming started on 15 January 1941, with location shooting on Universal Studio’s backlot outside Los Angeles.

Eagle Squadron pilots disliked the fictionalisation of their experiences, but the film was a box office hit, earning a profit of $697,607. It cost $908,768 and earned $2,607,422. Its San Francisco premiere at the Orpheum Theater raised $200,000 in war bond sales.

Stack recalled Barrymore as ‘a sad and thoroughly mixed up lady with an inclination to drink away her problems, a fiery temper and an erratic emotional perspective. But she had neither the time nor the training to acquire the enormous technical foundation in acting that other members of her famous family had.’

Walter Wanger immediately copyrighted the name of Eagle Squadron for his film, but Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox conceived and made A Yank in the RAF and Warner Bros made International Squadron along similar lines.

Hilariously, Lubin landed the job directing after his success with Abbott and Costello movies.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,673

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