What makes it different from others?

Undescribable Perfection

Absolutely Fantastic

Blistering performances.

While other reviewers rush to relegate this movie to B-movie status and criticize its then-characteristic (for 1952) sloppy use of stock footage, I expect to be watching this movie again from time to time. This is truly one of those they don't make anymore. The point no one else on here seems to have noticed is the 1950's era docudrama undertone it has that you typically won't see in the more story-focused A-list movie, and how much that quality adds to this movie. It might easily have been subtitled (with a drum roll), "Your United States Navy Aircraft Carrier In World War Two, And Today" ("Hand, SALUTE!"). While the plot and characterizations are thin, shopworn, cliched, and not particularly realistic bits of trite melodrama (there is some really classic corn here; and could the ever-stolid Sterling Hayden playing a hero ever do anything else?), the real story here is to give you some sense, however light, of aircraft carrier operations in the last year to year-year-and-a-half of the war, and in this it could be worse. The plot commences by introducing the squadron members, with the evident aim of showing the slice of American life represented by the new pilots deploying for their first combat roles. From there it moves to a treatment (albeit, very light-weight) of operations and life aboard (including, significantly, the sometimes ample downtime these guys could experience, ranging from card games to the inevitable mail-call; it makes the point that life on board a ship is most often more than just eat-sleep-fight-repeat). The light losses the ship and squadron experience are also believable for this period, since the vast majority of Japan's most skilled pilots had by then been killed in previous battles, most notably in the loss of no less than four big-deck carrier loads of their best naval aircrew at the Battle of Midway back in 1942, followed by their losses in the Solomon Islands beginning later that year and in 1943. Unlike the United States, Japan did not devote sufficient resources to training new pilots for combat, so that by the time our heroes in this movie show up, the average Japanese pilot was lucky to be able to take off and eventually make it back to safely land at his home field without injuring himself, with the question of being effective in air combat against a decently-trained and well-equipped enemy being something they could not begin to answer adequately. (Indeed, it was this aspect of Japanese military aviation which contributed to the adoption of "Kamikaze" tactics about the time this movie takes place; it was far easier in time, effort, and increasingly-scarce aviation fuel to teach a raw recruit how to take off and fly someplace, and then crash himself into something, than to make a real pilot out of him. With Kamikaze tactics not only did you not need to teach a guy how to fight his airplane, you didn't even need to teach him how to find his way home, and then land. To the contrary, such training would actually make him a less motivated Kamikaze, because he might then decide he had an option to crashing his plane against an American target, to his immediate and irrevocable death.) This state of affairs also explains the incredible toll of Japanese aircraft in the "Marianas Turkey Shoot", also depicted in the film, where hundreds of Japanese planes were shot down in a single day, losses which in normal World War II air battles would have been more like ten times less even on the worst of days. Best of all is the use of all the genuine stock footage seen in this movie. While the casual cutting turns the film into a veritable continuity error festival, to plane-spotters that is all the better, because you get to see just about every American naval combat aircraft in the inventory at one point or another, in actual wartime operations and better still, in color. While many of the clips used have been used repeatedly over the ensuing decades in television, movies, and innumerable documentaries, until recent years they had been copied over (and over again) in black and white, and to see all these color originals must have been very unusual and a special treat back in 1952. (At this point it might be worth mentioning that the use of F4U Corsairs in this movie is a significant anachronism. The Navy never deployed this kind of plane on carriers before Okinawa in 1945; surely the reason you see them in this movie is that by 1951 when it was shot, they would have been the last propeller-driven World War Two fighter aircraft the Navy still used, and so to get fresh, exciting, cinematic-quality footage of flight deck operations they would have to be substituted for the F6F Hellcats these pilots would have really flown in 1944 and before Okinawa in 1945, at a minimum. This is also the reason why all the rear-projection shots of squadron members in flight show F6F's in the background, a cinematic mixing of metaphors if there ever was one.) Anyway, for these qualities I give this movie a seven out of ten; its plodding plot and characters are balanced out by getting a glimpse, however Hollywoodized, of carrier onboard life in the latter part of the war and post-war periods.

This film seems to never go away. I am not sure why. Perhaps because of Sterling Hayden, perhaps because of the footage of WW2 vintage aircraft and ships. I am fan of both but there is just not much to this. Hayden is on a carrier near Korea and starts recalling his WW2 days and we go quickly to an extended flashback of that. From then on, we get predictable scenes on the carrier involving the various personal issues of the pilots interspersed with stock Navy footage edited into dogfights, formations flying, bombing runs, landings and takeoffs. That is it, don't hope for anything else. The aerial footage itself will not satisfy the purist unless you hope to entertain and flatter oneself with identifying all its inconsistencies. Pilots can take off in a Hellcat, fly in a Corsair, bomb in a Helldiver or Avenger and then land in a Hellcat even though they are supposed to be part of a 1944 Navy fighter squadron which should almost certainly be using Hellcats exclusively. It is really quite an impossible mishmash that would give a good chuckle to any pilot from the time.

Richard Carlson is the pilot who lands a green squadron aboard the USS Princeton, but before they can take a crack at those Japs they all must be whipped into shape by their tough commander, Sterling Hayden. The combat missions increase in difficulty and some losses are incurred but eventually they straighten up and fly right, thanks to Hayden's unyielding demands.Most of the combat footage is familiar from other films about the war in the Pacific. If I see that flaming Japanese fighter skimming the surface of the ocean and curving into the ocean one more time, I think I'll -- well, I don't know what I'll do. Write a love letter to Lindsay Lohan or something equally crazy.Some of the newsreel photos are fresher than that. In one case, we see from the bridge of a carrier the slow-motion bounce of a Corsair that brings the airplane and its monstrous propellor, the size of windmill blades, careering into the superstructure just below the camera placement. I can't imagine how the photographer escaped with his legs intact.At the same time, though, there is a reckless disregard for historical niceties and for continuity. We see the American aviators in the distinctive cockpits of Corsairs (the Japanese are seen in mock ups of canopies from later models of the F6F Hellcat) and the next we see from external shots that they are flying Hellcats or Helldivers or Douglas Dauntlesses. You don't really need to be an airplane aficionado to find this a little irritating. If you're anything but an underaged clod you'll find it annoying. It's like watching a movie of a man driving a speeding car on the freeway and in the next shot he's bent over a bicycle's handlebars on a country road.The plot is a version of the process that had already become cinematic fodder and was to continue serving the same purpose, a thread to hang other events and developments on. The new commander must take charge of a group that is either new to combat or disillusioned by it. Often, as here, he has a tender-minded executive officer who is too close to his men and seems to be coddling them. The commander must be cruel in order to be kind. It's his job to be tough on them because no matter how miserable he makes their lives, it's nothing compared to combat. I'll mention "Take the High Ground," "Patton," "Twelve O'Clock High," and "Flying Leathernecks" as other examples.But although the ultimate goal is lofty enough, the dynamics are really more interesting from a psychological point of view. One thing about military training, or any other preparation for a life-and-death enterprise, is that it provides an outlet for sadistic impulses of the commander. In the movies, the commander almost always ends up showing his humanitarian side. ("The Caine Mutiny" is an anomaly in this regard.) And we, the audience, watch with delight as the commander goes from man to man, ripping each subordinate a new sphincter. Sigmund Freud called it Schadenfreude, taking joy in seeing the pain inflicted on someone else who's shown weakness. And the caring quality of the commander that is revealed at the end, when his men understand him and his motives better, is a sop thrown to the audience so they don't have to feel guilty about having enjoyed all the pain they've just witnessed. I once had a skipper like that. On the surface he was kind of crusty and abrasive, but underneath that he was a sack of sentimental mush. And underneath THAT he was a real MEAN SOB.There's an interesting movie buried in this strictly routine genre film but no one has bothered to try digging it out. Certainly not the writers. ("We're going to hit them, and hit them hard.") I generally like war movies because war is in many ways the ultimate experience -- putting your life at risk because a stranger orders you to and without any hope of personal profit. But it's disappointing when they treat war as if it were something that only belongs in comic books or cartoons. The total social calamity that war represents is cheapened.

I am into WW2 aircraft carriers and the Pacific War and I find this film to be a good one for its time. The editing is great and there is only a couple of war film segments that appear twice. Unlike Midway, they don't use modern carrier shots and even through it is not completely tied to a battle or campaign, every thing gets explained(In Midway, they didn't show the fact that the USS Yorktown CV5 sinks, or at least is supposed to sink). Over all, I'll give this film 3 1/2 stars out of five.