Schlacht in den Wolken

Aces High - having never seen the movie before, but I had heard of it, I went ahead and bought it, expecting it to be good. It was! The dogfight scenes were very convincing, although stock footage from 'The Blue Max' was used in places, but only to add a sort of 'link' to the footage you saw in the movie. Stampe SV.4s made excellent substitutes for SE5As, but the Stearmans/Tiger Moths and Jungmeisters weren't exactly convincing. But hey, who cares? This is a top notch movie, with good performances and convincing setpieces. See it, enjoy it!

Written from the English point of view, this film seems to have it's tongue in it's cheek at times, but it's not at all funny. There are several flashes of humor in the early scenes, at the expense of the British upper class, but those quickly give way to the special horrors of the first war fought in the air.

Patriotic young pilots straight out of college lost their lives in literally a few days time, due to their inexperience and the stress of this new kind of battle. Malcolm McDowell has the unwelcome task of leading the 76th Squadron and also visiting colleges to drum up recruits, all the while knowing he's inviting them to an almost certain death. He keeps these new recruits at arms length to soften the blow to his mental health when they invariably get shot down. When he shows up at his own alma mater, an idealistic young man, played by Peter Firth, signs up for McDowell's squadron. On his arrival at the airfield, Firth sees the evidence of the turnover in pilots but fails to see the connection to his own longevity; a family photo and personal effects are whisked out of the room he's been assigned, right in front of his eyes. He is introduced to Simon Ward, a stony-faced pilot who by the end of the movie is finally driven insane by the awful, daily anticipation of his own death in battle.

The young pilots experience the respect that their station in the Air Corps elicits from the locals and from women, but at the same time they see how they are more likely to be killed than the average filthy foot soldier. Firth is taken with a local cabaret girl, who invites him to her room one night. The next night, when he expects her to be glad to see him, she ignores him and pays attention to an older, richer officer. The very next day the pilots are given the task of destroying German spotter balloons, which always have heavy gun and air protection, and the older pilots know this is almost a death warrant. Six planes go out, with McDowell and Firth in two of them, but you'll have to watch the film to find out how many come back.

A very good, but depressing, film, McDowell is subdued in his performance and seems to come out of his cocoon only at the end. This is necessary, I think, for his character to survive in the surroundings of constant tragedy. Firth is naive in the extreme, and this probably a correct portrayal of a green recruit in WWI, where there was no frame of reference for how dangerous those early airplanes were. The film shows us just how little the commanders valued the lives of their men by sending them out unprepared and inexperienced, and that they know after one group of fliers is decimated, there is always a fresh batch of innocent boys to take their place. I recommend the film highly, since it has a firm anti-war message.

This is an excellent film about WWI Royal Flying Corps and their fights against the Germans over the trenches.

Fantastic cast - McDowell, Trevor Howard, Peter Firth, Simon Ward and Christopher Plummer - they are all some of the best in the business at portraying English upper classes. Especially the mean McDowell (with his ironic speech at Eton 'we are caning them' when they're not really) and the callow Peter Firth, all Boys Own enthusiasm.

Shows the pious nature of the English elite, with John Gielgud as the headmaster spouting out empty platitudes about decency and 'playing the game' while, meanwhile, McDowell is playing dirty tricks on German pilots (the scene where he gets his opponent to land in the field and then destroys him as he walks towards his plane to offer help).

Fantastic aerial shots.

I remember "Aces High" when it was released in Argentina (1977. Since then I had the opportunity of watching it twice on video. For me is an excellent example that you still can produce a great film even if the subject (WWI) has been treated dozens of times. Although I have not read "Journey's End" I did read many factual accounts of the air war on the Western Front during WWI and the spirit of those terrible years has been faithfully re-created. Malcom McDowell proves, once a again, what an excellent actor he is and the rest of the cast is as good as him.

The character played by Simon Ward, is one of the most moving and important within the film. This was brought to my attention last year when, watching a documentary about the Battle of Britain, I saw a former Hurricane pilot telling how depressed he was by the terribly high casualty-rate that he decided to stop making friends,since more likely they shall be dead within a fortnight. With this in mind Simon Ward's performance has deeper meaning. It is not only that he is haunted by the idea of his inevitable death, he doesn't want to make friends because he has lost too many.

The scene where Malcom McDowell throws a party to celebrate the arrival of "his" prisoner (the German pilot)would seem strange if not ridiculous to those who do not have a certain knowledge of the mentality of the European aristocracy, who formed the backbone of the officer-class in those days. According to them war was a gentlemanly affair were certain principles should be observed; one of them was the corteous treatment of prisoners (as long as they belong the same class)particularly if they had fought bravely. The concept was already an anachronism in 1914 where the colossal scale of the slaughter and its horrendous impersonality made the illusion of "the noble duel" obsolete if not ridiculous BUT, there was the aeroplane, a chance to move the clock back to the days of aristocratic man-to-man fights, a chance to escape the modern, faceless and industrialized murder of trench warfare. That's why WWI fighter pilots (all of them gentlemen in the truest sense of the word) behaved in that way. This film is also a very sad reminder of the destruction of a whole world that, with all its defects, had some very valuable principles. Principles that nowadays most of people would laugh at, which is also very sad.

I have seen this film when I was young, and was very impressed. Probably it turns on my interest in aerial warfare in World War I. Despite technically awful from the airplanes types view, the film shows exactly, with no glamour, how was the life of fighter pilots in WWI.

Life expectancy for a new pilot was just two weeks. There was no real training for the pilots, and few of the old pilots care about teaching anything to the new ones. If you look at the dangerous machines they should fly, antiaircraft fire and the enemy machines, it's a miracle that someone has survived to told us the history.