A Film Canon

This war drama is effectively a pretext for a series of spectacular aerial sequences, which form their own, subsidiary, three-act narrative. These represent an incredible technical achievement, elaborating a relationship between camera and aeroplane that includes shots from the cockpit, wings and nose, and encompasses take-off, landing, diving, spiralling, flying in various formations, bombing and fighting with other planes, balloons and parachutists. However, they also possess considerable aesthetic merit, as Wellman figures the conflict between the "romantic dream" and "stern reality" of flight in terms of a sublime whose parameters are both technological and Romantic, and encapsulated in the moment at which the pilots reach the "high sea of heaven", crossing the cumulus-stratus layer to view it from above. This, in turn, alters the parameters of warfare, translating the canonical space of no-man's-land into vertical terms, with the result that the sky continually looms as a repository of brilliant violence, enhanced by Wellman's taste for wide, open, brightly lit spaces, such as the air training school and, later, the military aerodrome where most of the ground action takes place. Although the latter is, by comparison, stylistically mediocre, there are some notable moments at which Wellman imbues his camera with the flight that it has proven itself capable of depicting, most spectacularly an extended, palpably disembodied pan across a sea of tables towards the protagonist, who, drunk on champagne, is attempting to catch some of the hallucinatory bubbles flying all around him.