Duell der Helikopter

Elegaic, and subtly played by the star. How often could you say that of a 70's TV movie? (I think) there is a closing line in the movie, "You didn't have to do that." It's about having been brave once, in forgotten circumstances, and then, suddenly, living up to that again in old age. Of course, it's full of technical glitches and cliches, but I like it.

This film was part of the edge-of-your-seat action/chase genre made popular in the '70s. Films like Vanishing Point, and Smokey and the Bandit, where nothing more than a car chase sequence with a little cohesive drama or comedy thrown in.

The makers of Birds of Prey obviously had the same thing in mind, but they added an interesting twist; helicopters instead of cars.

David Janssen plays Harry Walker, an ex-WWII fighter pilot longing for the glory days of dog fights and heroic aerobatics. He is a now twice divorced, lonely, and somewhat bitter, Salt Lake City helicopter traffic reporter. Ralph Meeker plays Jim "Mac" McAndrew, a former war buddy of Walker's who prefers to stay on the ground, forget flying, war planes, and the past, to focus on the his career as a Salt Lake City cop.

On a routine day Walker witnesses a bank robbery from the air. He calls it into Mac who thinks he's pulling a gag. The robbers kill a bank guard and take a hostage then get away in a stolen car. The chase begins. The police join the chase as car and chopper scream through urban Salt Lake City.

This was a pretty good film for a made-for-TV movie. The flying sequences are well done and well coordinated. The flying stunts, including diving under overpasses, flying into and out of buildings, tumbling (auto-rotating), and flying between sky scrapers, are all done with real helicopters. No toys on strings or models with goofy trick photography were used. The acting and drama aren't bad, but that's not what this movie's about. Like Top Gun, this movie's about flying.

David Janssen and Ralph Meeker are perfectly cast in this TV movie as World War II flying buddies who have had disparate levels of success in adjusting to post-war life. Meeker's character, McAndrews, is an apparently well-balanced police captain in Salt Lake City. Janssen's character, Harry Walker, flies a helicopter for a local radio station and has not been able to put the war behind him.

Janssen's character witnesses a bank robbery and chases the perpetrators, who are also in a helicopter. The aerial stunt work is top-notch, and the film was made on location in Salt Lake City at a time when you could fake very little with special effects.

But the core of the movie is the relationship between Walker and McAndrews. Walker feels alive for the first time in a long time as he chases the bad guys. McAndrews tries to restrain Walker through most of the movie, although it's clear he sympathizes with his old friend. And at the end he's as crazy as Walker.

When the movie was originally televised, a beautiful and perfectly appropriate version of the song "I'll Get By" played over the opening credits. I have searched long and hard for a recording of that version of that song without success. It wasn't the cover by Keely Smith, or by Billie Holliday.

I wouldn't have looked so hard for a recording if the song was included in the videotape of "Birds of Prey." I suspect that whoever put the movie on video would have had to pay royalties to someone if the song was retained. So this despicable person replaced "I'll Get By" with an instrumental big band song that is probably in the public domain.

This thrifty gent likewise axed a song from the body of the movie to which Janssen's character sings along. So the videotape viewer is left to wonder what song Janssen is singing as an instrumental big band number plays.

I've seen "Birds of Prey" only once, decades ago, but I remember it as great fun. It's also a piece of cultural history. It first aired on TV in January 1973, as the U.S. war in Vietnam was officially rushing to an end, and it's a cops-and-robbers adventure about helicopters, the chariots of choice of that conflict.

The setting is a big city in the American West. The villains are robbers -- Vietnam vets, perhaps? -- who make their getaway by chopper. The squabbling heroes are two middle-aged men who served together in World War II. One of them (played by Ralph Meeker) is now a successful bureaucrat, serving as the city's police chief. The other (played by David Janssen) is somewhere between a free spirit and a ne'er-do-well, a man who flies a traffic helicopter to earn a living but has never left behind the memories of the air war of his youth. When the robbers take to the skies, the battle of the generations is on.

They didn't call such men such as Meeker's and Janssen's characters "the greatest generation" in 1973. They called them "the establishment." This movie is nostalgia for the simplicities of World War II before such nostalgia was fashionable.

If the DVD version does indeed feature modern rock instead of the original movie's 1940s sound track, it's a shame. But maybe it's inevitable. Now that the World War II veterans have grown old and the Vietnam veterans have taken their place in the middle-aged zone, few viewers would recognize the great big band standards. Alas, time flies. Like a bird.

I'm not 100% sure if I saw this TV movie when it first appeared on ABC because this was before my family had a VCR. However, I must have, since I recall "Three Little Fishies" and "I'll Get By" playing during the course of the movie. Some years later, I saw it listed on TBS and fired up the non-HiFi Betamax to capture this "aerial cops-and-robbers" movie. (Alas, none of the surviving Betamaxes can play the tape, so it's all a matter of unreliable memory. No, I didn't get a VHS unit until the VCR wars were over.) At first glance, it looked like a routine movie about a helicopter pilot going about an ordinary day, with a traffic jam and sunbathing beauties to liven up his day. The opening sequence referring to his days as a Flying Tiger and the testy relationship with his ex-buddy-turned police captain should have been a tipoff that things were going to get interesting. Then there was the break in at the military weapons depot by fur-faced, sunglass wearing perpetrators who were OK within killing anyone who stood in their way. Unlike the technowizardry found in "Blue Thunder," Harry walker has only the tools at hand to face down a set of not-ready-for-peacetime military veterans. As the only game in town once an ordinary bank heist turned into an aerial pursuit, this movie shows why Tom Brokaw would call such folk "The Greatest Generation." Considering what kinds of special efx were available at that time, this movie shows what a difference between the real thing vs. the green screen DFX-safe world of today. (As with screenplays, Real trumps Imagination or even "Reimagining".) A chance search on Amazon.com for a butchered VHS version yielded an "On Order" notation. Release of "Birds of Prey" is set for July 12, 2005, and I'll be there to fly the spacious skies of Utah once again, even if "Three Little Fishies" or "I'll Get By" aren't in the soundtrack.