Desperate Journey

I just love this picture. It was the first movie I ever saw and I keep coming back to it because it's pure escapism. Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan were never better than in this World War II saga of Royal Air Forcers downed behind enemy lines. They escape Nazi capture and take the audience on a rousing adventure as they make a high spirited bid to reach home. Never a dull moment, this is an obvious precursor to the Indiana Jones films. Raymond Massey is pure evil as the Nazi commandant who relentlessly pursues the fliers. Arthur Kennedy and Alan Hale provide able support and welcome humor as RAF comrades sharing in the robust flight across Germany. Not to be missed!

This is probably the silliest WW2 film made during the war. But if you dismiss that fact, you find yourself enjoying a well-made piece of Hollywood escapism. Everyone in the cast seems to enjoy themselves. Walsh's direction is good and Max Steiner provides a really exciting and stirring score. So who's quibbling?

Propaganda? Yes. Some preposterous scenes? Yes. Entertaining? Very. Think "Hogan's Heros", with a Keystone Kops chase scene.

It is easy to imagine folks in theaters in 1942 cheering loudly as the GIs outwit the thick headed Germans in one escapade after another. Just when it appears they have escaped capture, they are surrounded by the enemy again, with no apparent chance to escape this time.

It is easy to find fault with many films, and this one is no exception. However, imperfect films can still be very entertaining if we allow them to be!

Not currently out on VHS or DVD - but look for it on Turner Classics.

Flynn's last line in the movie sums up the tenor of the entire piece, "Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs." A bomber crew on a heroic mission is shot down and make their way from Poland, through Germany and Holland, to England, losing a few of their members enroute, but nothing compared to the slaughter and destruction the wisecracking warriors wreak on the Germans.

Let's see. Dispensing with the crew members who die early on, there is a British flight sergeant whose role is to be the plucky but inexperienced youngster who is wounded and holds the others back, although he urges them to leave him behind and save themselves. Then there is Alan Hale as the comic old cook, more or less transposed from the USS Copperfin in "Destination Tokyo." Then there is Arthur Kennedy as the serious Canadian accountant who objects to the playful way the others make war on the Nazis. He mistakenly thinks war is a serious business, but he comes around in the end. There is Errol Flynn, the only officer, and an Australian, who organizes one adventure after another and speaks German. (Somebody has to speak German.) Ronald Reagan is the American from Jersey City. He is Flynn's sidekick.

The Germans aren't so well differentiated but they're just as stereotyped. Raymond Massy is the monocled Herr Major who pursues them for personal reasons across half of Europe. Sig Rumann provides the best comic interlude. As a railroad policeman he discovers our gang making themselves at home in Gorings private car. He sarcastically tells them in German that he's happy to see that they've made themselves at home in the Reichsmarshall's quarters and asks them if there is anything he can do for them -- "Do you think the cigarettes are good enough for you?" Alan Hale completely mistakes Rumann's sarcasm and comes back with a jolly, "Oh, ja, ja," until Rumann spits on Hale's outstretched hand and throws them all off the train.

Boy, this movie is packed with action. Badabing, badaboom! Trains, planes, and automobiles -- one chase after another. Flynn setting his cap firmly on his head before diving through a window. Most of the movie was shot on Warner's lot, but there is some nice location shooting too at what I take to be the flats around South San Francisco Bay. Prop up a few fake windmills on the horizon and you have Holland. (You can see the same flats substituting for the Japanese coast in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," or nearby ones on the Sacramento River posing as a ships' graveyard in "Blood Alley.")

The story isn't really worth going into. It isn't quite as focused as some other war movies in that there is no single mission to which the group must devote themselves. Instead they improvise a lot. But you can hardly notice it because the pace is so fast. Good old Raoul Walsh. Flynn got along a lot better with Walsh than he did with Michael Curtiz. Both were demanding directors but Walsh was more nearly human, stipulating only that Flynn's drinking wouldn't begin until five in the afternoon.

And Max Steiner, the composer, should get a medal. How can he possibly have ground out so many scores for so many different movies in so short a time? Did he ever sleep? He doesn't give this one a memorable theme as he did with "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," but still there's hardly a moment that the orchestra is not banging away behind the action. One thing you do when you're pressed for time is to incorporate traditional tunes into the score, substituting them for original music. I was able to catch snatches of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (or, I guess, "God Save the King," in this context), "Du, Du, Liegst mir Im Herzen," "Deutschland Uber Alles" (or the hymn it comes from), "British Grenadiers," "Rule Brittania," and "Ich Hatt Einen Kameraden."

No comments on acting are required. If you're in the mood for being diverted, "Desperate Journey" ought to get the job done. It's unpretentious propagandistic fun.

In this exhilarating adventure five POWs in Nazi Germany fight their way back to freedom...

Errol Flynn plays a downed RAF pilot making his journey through enemy territory disguised as a German officer... In addition to evading capture he manages with his crew, a Scottish veteran of World War I, Alan Hale; a Canadian navigator, Arthur Kennedy; an American Ronald Reagan and a young Englishman Ronald Sinclair, to blow up a secret chemical plant and steal a German bomber from a Messerschmitt factory...

The film (with exciting music by Max Steiner) ends with Flynn leading an RAF assault on the airplane factory after various acts of sabotage & violent conflict, aided and inspired by an anti-Nazi German family headed by a pleasant doctor (Albert Basserman) & his sweet daughter (Nancy Coleman).

The best scene comes early in the picture, when a Nazi Major (Raymond Massey) after having questioned the captured RAF crew, calls for a private interview with Reagan, thinking he will agree to reveal what he knows about the new RAF bomber engines, and recites easily an impressive number of facts about the component parts--all nonsense... Once he has the major's rapt attention, he punches him on the jaw, knocking him out and then help himself to the major's breakfast...