I think in WWII, and Band of Brothers for that matter, they weren't worried about people thinking the characters might be queer, so they didn't bother to explicitly point out in the first scene LIKES GIRLS!
I just saw a rather strenuously heterosexual training film from 1947! But I also just saw The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), where one soldier sits for more than five minutes holding the dead hand of another as if the other man were alive and could feel it and be comforted and the Production Code didn't blink. So far this series seems to have a serious twenty-first-century impediment to the idea of male tenderness and I hope it gets over it soon.
I'm a little salty.
*passes the shaker*
The narration didn't establish anything that couldn't have been shown to use with other storytelling. I'm probably slightly in the minority, but I didn't like any of the narration in BoB, either. Except maybe Webster, because he was SO Webster! It just feels like lazy storytelling.
The voiceover tends to be the thing I want to rip off the print of a film noir unless something about the voice or the interplay with the action is especially well done, so no argument. If it's being done here as a convention of the time, it needed to feel more like it.
I'm going to go find out what The Way to the Stars is, and how to watch it.
Does this site work for you? John Mills as the lens character in the life of a fictional RAF station which fields first Bristol Blenheims, then Douglas Bostons, then hosts B-17s; he also flies Avro Lancasters and ends up in a Pathfinder squadron. Heavily reworked by Terence Rattigan from his stage play Flight Path (1942), which I have not seen or read. I watched it in 2022 when falling through John Mills and never managed to write about it given the chaos of the year, but I liked it a lot. Attrition rates in the main cast not quite the pure meat grinder of The Dawn Patrol (1930), but otherwise about what you would expect. The retrospective frame is one of these neat little shifts of reality because it looks entirely normal now to open on a derelict airfield before rolling back to fill in its wartime past, but the film itself was released between V-E Day and V-J Day; it's projecting the war-won future that hadn't quite happened yet.
no subject
I just saw a rather strenuously heterosexual training film from 1947! But I also just saw The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), where one soldier sits for more than five minutes holding the dead hand of another as if the other man were alive and could feel it and be comforted and the Production Code didn't blink. So far this series seems to have a serious twenty-first-century impediment to the idea of male tenderness and I hope it gets over it soon.
I'm a little salty.
*passes the shaker*
The narration didn't establish anything that couldn't have been shown to use with other storytelling. I'm probably slightly in the minority, but I didn't like any of the narration in BoB, either. Except maybe Webster, because he was SO Webster! It just feels like lazy storytelling.
The voiceover tends to be the thing I want to rip off the print of a film noir unless something about the voice or the interplay with the action is especially well done, so no argument. If it's being done here as a convention of the time, it needed to feel more like it.
I'm going to go find out what The Way to the Stars is, and how to watch it.
Does this site work for you? John Mills as the lens character in the life of a fictional RAF station which fields first Bristol Blenheims, then Douglas Bostons, then hosts B-17s; he also flies Avro Lancasters and ends up in a Pathfinder squadron. Heavily reworked by Terence Rattigan from his stage play Flight Path (1942), which I have not seen or read. I watched it in 2022 when falling through John Mills and never managed to write about it given the chaos of the year, but I liked it a lot. Attrition rates in the main cast not quite the pure meat grinder of The Dawn Patrol (1930), but otherwise about what you would expect. The retrospective frame is one of these neat little shifts of reality because it looks entirely normal now to open on a derelict airfield before rolling back to fill in its wartime past, but the film itself was released between V-E Day and V-J Day; it's projecting the war-won future that hadn't quite happened yet.