NFR Project: 'The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress' (1944)

 

NFR Project: “The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress”

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Jerome Chodorov, Lester Koenig, William Wyler

Pho: William H Clothier, William V. Skall, Harold J. Tannenbaum, William Wyler

Ed: Lyn Harrison

Premiere: April 13, 1944

45 min.

This is the most death-defying of all the films in the National Film Registry list.

The idea for a documentary about the crew of a B-17 bomber came from the War Department. It wanted to give folks at home a sense of what the soldiers were facing in the air war over Germany. Thanks to the intrepid director William Wyler and a brave crew of cameramen, America got a harrowing look at the cold hard facts of what World War II combat was like.

To be sure, this was a propaganda film. The purpose was to document the 25^th and final required mission of a bomber crew over Germany, before their crew was taken off the front line and rotated back to the United States. The Memphis Belle, captained by Robert K. Morgan, fit the bill. The captain got Wyler’s word that the filming would not affect the plane’s operations, especially during combat. Then the cameramen went for a few rides – no fewer than seven missions.

In keeping with poetic license, and the desire to get graphic footage of combat, not all of the footage in the film is of the Belle. In February of 1943 they went on a mission in the Jersey Bounce, and there is some footage from that. (Wyler reassured Morgan that, if they went down on their last mission, he had a backup crew and bomber in place to make the movie about.)

This is the real thing. The movie was shot with 16-millimeter color silent film stock. Narration, dialogue, sound effects, and music were dubbed in later. We are given an outline of how a mission comes together, how the crew prepares, the bomber group’s takeoff from the English fields. After a lengthy journey east, we get into it. Flak bursts pepper the skies.

They reach their target. Bombs away. The film does not shy away from showing the effects of the bombing from the air. The bomber group hightails it for home. German fighters swoop in, taking out Allied bombers on either side of the Belle. It’s brutal. You are watching men trying to kill each other, and succeeding.

Wyler knew how to tell a story. He crafts a taut and compelling narrative out of what could have nominally been random footage. He creates a story of American valor, not stridently but with dignity.

We cut from the return-flight battle to the airfields, where crews wait for the planes’ return. The craft straggle in; the movie frankly shows the wounded men being bundled off the planes. We are shown the holes in the planes, the rents in their tails. The tone of the narration is defiant, but the pictures detail the cost of war in the faces of the wounded and the dead. The men of the Memphis Belle survive.

Then every member of the crew gets the Distinguished Flying Cross, and they get to meet the King and Queen of England. Now, to be sure, not every retiring bomber crew got this treatment. It’s a was kind of a grotesque bet. If they, this particular crew, live, all this cool stuff happens to them. If they die, there are replacements. 

It’s ultimately a patriotic document that doesn’t shy away from the facts of the war.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.