Healing Power: It's So Sad

It's so sad - and all you veterans will likely agree.

This was my “Classic Movie Week” and it includes such classics as “Metropolis” (1928), “Casablanca” (1941), “The Maltese Falcon” (1939), and others. Having discovered the greatness of Humphrey Bogart, I returned to the library and picked up more Bogie Movies (though I still haven't figured out what is meant by “Bogart-ing” a smoke). The one I sat down to watch today was titled “Across the Pacific” and starred his Maltese Falcon leading lady, Mary Astor.

On the top menu of the DVD for “Across the Pacific” was a choice for “Warner’s Night at the Movies”. It included a trailer for a Cagney film about the RCAF, a newsreel with details about raising a sunken Japanese bomber from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, a cartoon (which I have not yet watched) and “Men of the Sky”, a 30-minute story about the heroes of the US Army Air Corps. It is this last portion I wish to elaborate upon.

This was a production of Warner Bros. I do not know their stance during recent years of national trauma, but Hollywood, in general, is very keen to make the American Fighting Men and Women look like terrorists rather than patriots.

“Men of the Sky” begins with a look at a USAAC graduating class - where they came from and where they are going. It ends with... Well, I was going to paraphrase, but I'll let the narrator do the talking. He said it much better than I could.

Through sky and wind and heat and cold, darkness and fog. But that's where we have to go to fight a war. That and a lot of other places. To keep the murderers we know well; the barbarians against the freedom of free people away from our shores, our homes and our families.
What's under those wings? {camera zooms to wings on Airman's chest} Why, the small towns of America. And hundreds of churches where we worship as we please. And kids playing in their front yards. And soda pop. And farmers digging the soil. And the right to say what we think and believe what we believe.
And you're under those wings - you who built the planes that keep 'em flying. You who gave us these boys; who saw them grow up and go to school and get jobs and go off to fight a war for the very things you taught them were worth fighting for. Yes, and you who hope they'll come back.
That's what's under those wings! It's us! All of us and what we're fighting for!
So spread those wings Army Airmen! Spread them over Tokyo! Boom! And Yokohama! Boom! Drop your bombs! Boom! On Berlin! Boom! And Osaka! Boom! And Dresden! Boom! And Hamburg! Boom! Bomb their factories and their ammunition plants! Boom! And blast their planes right out of the skies! Rat-a-tat-a-tat!
The hearts of all of us fly with you under those wings!

Why can't Hollywood make something like that today? Rather than a movie about how the government betrayed their soldiers (“Black Hawk Down”) or about how our government bombed our own shores in order to start a war (“Fahrenheit 911”)? Why can't Hollywood celebrate the men and women keeping us free rather than portraying them as madmen (“Full Metal Jacket”)?

I'm off my soapbox. I want to go watch my cartoon and movie. Let me know what you think. Is it me or Hollywood that's nuts?

Labels: veterans movies