Canal Zone

This WWII story of melting pot recruits -- in this case, bomber pilots -- has all the usual wisecracks, including the one about Brooklyn -- is perfectly ordinary. Chester Morris, who is usually good, is particularly good in this one with his usual straightforward performance. This is the sort of movie that made John Wayne and Randolph Scott superstars, but Morris was a little too old, lacked momentum in his career -- he had already spent too many years in B pictures -- and so never escaped. He would shortly go into the Boston Blackie series and while he would work steadily and well through his death -- right up through his role in THE GREAT WHITE HOPE in 1970 -- his career would not provide many high spots.

Still, if you haven't seen too many movies of this sort, you might enjoy this as much as I did.

This film is extremely boring. If I give it 3 stars it is for the special effects (no credit is given) and the use of model airplanes. But the rest is routine, and a bit on the absurd side. A retired American officer is running a camp where men are trained to fight as bomber pilots during II World War, somewhere in the Panama Canal Zone, close enough to the capital city (where they seldom go, only one scene that could happen anywhere) and far away from US military bases, losing the opportunity to add some tension about the war going on and how the Canal could be affected. The central drama is the taming of a rich and spoiled recruit (John Hubbard) by a poor but tough all-American trainer (Chester Morris), and both are attracted to the only woman around (Harriet Hilliard), who happens to be the boring daughter of the boss, so she always manages to be present everywhere. The rest of the plot you have seen it many times before, betraying the enthusiasm of a few of the players: Hubbard, Larry Parks, Lloyd Bridges, Louis Jean Heydt and especially old pro George McKay. I saw this one while doing some research for a friend's book about foreign films made in or about Panama. Produced by Columbia Pictures, this is infinitely less interesting than movies made by "poverty row" studios as PRC-Producers Releasing Corporation ("South of Panama") and GNP-Grand National Pictures ("Panama Patrol"), or others produced with more zest, as Fox's "Marie Galante" and "Charlie Chan in Panama".

This is a fairly classic example of the kind of B-grade film studios turned out during World War II to support the war effort. (The story of that endeavor all by itself rates its own movie, though I doubt we are ever going to see it; luckily, though, you can find a documentary or two addressing it if you look around.) The thrust of such movies was often to single out some particular aspect of the operations our gallant boys were engaged in at the peril of their lives, with their wives, sweethearts, and mothers waiting back home in all anxiety, and tell their collective story. Thus, while other films, such as Warner Brothers's ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC or FIGHTING SEABEES focused on the merchant marine or the Navy's corps of SEABEES combat construction teams, respectively, this film sought to highlight the efforts of government-employed civilian ferry pilots who delivered aircraft to the Old World for use by military combat airmen in the Mediterranean and greater European theaters of operations during the war.

At that time, certain parts of the United State turned into giant mass production factories for airplanes such as the world had never known before, with the country producing a total of more than 300,000 new aircraft for war service. To put that in perspective, that was surely more airplanes than had been produced by every country in the entire world put together up to that point since the day the Wright brothers flew the first one in 1903. And thus it involved a similarly monumental effort to get them where they needed to go for fighting.

The methods varied depending on the type of aircraft and where they were needed. Few if any had the range to fly all the way across the Atlantic (let alone, the much larger Pacific) non-stop on their own. Thus, many were partially broken down and stowed on cargo ships for transshipment over the ocean, then reassembled at their destination (the disassembly/reassembly might seem inefficient, but it had to be done that way because of the tight shortage of available shipping that prevailed for most of the war). Others might fly over the North Atlantic by stopping at points in Canada and at Iceland. But this movie focuses on the ones that flew the extended route from the continental U. S. down to Brazil in South America, then crossed the South Atlantic at its narrowest point to intercept the hump of West Africa, proceeding after that to wherever they were needed, mostly, by the time this movie was shot, in North Africa, with Egypt being the usual destination. This route also figures, if only momentarily, in the much more famous movie THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), when one of the flier characters compares flying in Alaska with the torrid atmosphere of Accra (what is now the capital of Ghana in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa) that he had endured during this war; evidently he too was some kind of veteran of the ferry route in this movie.

As is typical in these kinds of movies, the thrust of things is on emotional melodramatics rather than wartime operations. Its treatment of operations is laughable, but that is 100% normal in this genre. They are always laughable in these movies. The melodrama also involves the absolutely standard tropes typically encountered: a self-impressed protagonist who needs a reality check and cutting down to size; the hard-nosed, no-nonsense instructor co-protagonist who will do that; the love interest who forms the apex of the inevitable love triangle; one sympathetic supporting character who dies to remind everybody of the sacrifices of war; & etc., etc. In this movie the BMOC-type is essayed by an Errol Flynn stand-in while the others are classics of the types they are playing; thus there is nothing unusual to see there, either. One thing that is interesting is to see some actors in lesser supporting roles who later became household names and faces but at this point were in their career infancy, including Lloyd Bridges, Forest Tucker, and Hugh Beaumont. The leads are actors best known to fans of old B-movies, such as Chester Morris, who may have been cast in this after having done the better film FIVE CAME BACK in 1939, with then-hottie dramatic actress Lucille Ball, John Carradine, and Patric Knowles. That also featured airplanes in the jungle.

One thing you will not see in this movie is the Panama Canal Zone. You will not see even a single stock-footage shot of the Panama Canal nor a single ship of any kind. Panama City is referenced repeatedly but you won't see a single shot of it nor so much as hear the mention of any single place inside the Canal Zone itself (Panama City being outside of the Zone). The choice of title is to be wondered at, even in spite of any publicity value it might have had. The movie has absolutely nothing to do with the Panama Canal. The understanding given by the movie is that pilots are being brought down there to be trained in ferry service -- or something (the purported flight training in this movie is difficult to reconcile with the context of the plot premise) -- on the Pacific Side in the Canal Zone. Why this would occur like that is not obvious from the film. While Panama is about due south of Florida, it does not figure on any map of the south Atlantic ferry route I have ever run across, as still being rather out of the way for trips culminating in Africa. It does not show up in the Canal Zone lore I have been exposed to connected with my own prior residence there (and my own grandfather was a Canal employee during the war). The well-known fields operating there during the war were the Navy's near Coco Solo on the Caribbean side (which was too far from Panama City to have anything to do with this movie), and the army's Albrook Field (which wouldn't have a naval officer in charge, as shown in the movie), along with some subsidiary fields further away and out in the provinces. Instead the field in this movie is referred to as "Ginger Bar", and even Google can't locate anything like that in Panama during the war. "Ginger Bar", being horse-drawn carriage distance from Panama City in the movie, doesn't comport with any other field I ever heard of or could find anything about online in preparing this review. While, knowing the government to be the way it always has been, it is not inconceivable that somebody might have set up a training program to teach pilots techniques particular to flying over mountainous jungles, I have heard nor could find nothing about this. I'm still waiting to learn of the basis for this aspect of this movie.

This movie might be worth viewing for typical wartime schlock early in the war years. I think it is one of those movies that today serves better as a document of its times than for strictly entertainment value.