Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

1943 and the allied bombing campaign is at its peak. The Memphis Belle is a B-17 "Flying Fortress" bomber in the US 8th Air Force. Its crew have completed 24 missions - one more and they go home. A documentary film crew captured their 25th mission, from preparation on the ground onwards.Superb documentary, directed by William Wyler. Captures very accurately the day-to-day lives of US bomber crews in Europe, including the dangers and sacrifices made. Good detail of the mission itself.Great footage, shot specifically for the documentary. The lives of the documentary crew were also in danger...Narration is stirring and brings home the importance of the bombers' roles, as well as how endangered the crews' lives were. Very sobering and emotional.The documentary inspired the great 1990 feature film, Memphis Belle.

Having met most of the men who flew this B-17 as well as the men commanding and the ground crew; it was confirmed to me that ordinary men do what was necessary to do during the War. They faced the enemy and did the job; in spite of a gnawing fear, they flew and became heroes. Men of courage mixed with pure guts most times. I know -----I married one who flew another plane of the same group and gave a part of himself so we could all live in freedom. We were also friends with the Crew Chief of the Memphis Belle.My husband was the Eastern Division Secretary for twelve years while Paul Chryst, Joe Camelleri, Joe Giambrone were Co Chairmen and Treasurer. The 91st Bombardment Group (H) Memorial Association was a wonderful outfit and we had many Rallies and Reunions all over the United States and Europe.

The pilot was 24-year-old Captain Robert K. Morgan from Asheville, North Carolina who was an industrial engineer before joining the Army in 1941; the co-pilot, whom Captain Morgan insisted was "the other pilot', was 25-year-old Captain James A. Verinis from New Haven, Connecticut, who was a business administration student at the University of Connecticut before entering the service in July of 1941; Captain Vincent B. Evans, the 23-year-old bombadier was one of the two married members of the crew, and was a fleet-truck operator in his home town of Fort Worth, Texas before enlisting in January of 1942; Captain Charles B. Leighton, from East Lansing,Michigan and a chemistry student at Ohio Wesleyan before entering the service, was the navigator. The engineer and top turret gunner was Technical Sergeant Harold P.Loch, a 23-year-old stevedore from Green Bay, Wisconsin who joined the service in November of 1941; Technical Sergeant Robert J.Hanson, a construction worker from Washington state and the other married crew member, was the radio operator. The 19-year-old "baby" of the Memphis Belle crew was waist-gunner Staff Sergeant Casimer A. Nastal who was a washing machine repairman from Detroit, Michigan with two confirmed fighter kills to his credit who thought he had more "but never had time to watch whether they went down"; Staff Sergeant Cecil H. Scott, a pressman for a rubber company in Rahway, New Jersey was the ball turret gunner and, at 27, the oldest member of the crew. One of the three cameraman was First Lieutenant Harold J. Tannenbaum, from Binghamton,New York, a World War I veteran who remained in the Navy until 1927. He re-entered the service in July,1942 when he received his commission in the Army Air Force. He was killed in action,age 46,in April of 1944 and received a posthumous Purple Heart.

The most interesting thing about this documentary is its inherent paradox. It is a look at a US air base in England, 1944; its preparations for and carrying out of a strike on a prime German economic base. This kind of event is a one-off, necessitating spontaneous film-making (you can't ask for another take). And yet the director is William Wyler. Wyler could be great, it is true, but he was one of the most rigid of filmmakers, with every scene so preprepared and exact that it was often difficult for it to breathe. He was a theatrical kind of director, favouring interior, static set-ups, often base on canoncial, or high-minded material (e.g. Emily Bronte, Henry James, 'Ben-Hur').Of course, like all documentaries, this film is heavily controlled, its 'reality' mediated by Wyler's craft, as well as the propaganda needs of the War Office. The film follows a very schematic script - preparations, attack, return - which reads more like a Hollywood treatment than the messy loose-ends of a war. Every event and 'actor' is shown to have a purpose, from the glamorous bombers to the lowly mechanics. Several scenes are obviously contrived ('real' people are terrible actors), and we are asked to believe that in the middle of a life-or-death dogfight, salty veterans wouldn't swear.The didactic narrator, a disembodied Voice of God in a very physical, corporeal conflict, gathers everything authoritively to himself - he tells us what we are seeing; he can inform us what the soldiers are saying; he explains tactics and motives, putting a relatively minor operation into the wider context of the US (definitely US!!) war effort. We are told, no less, what war is for. Images of brutal injury and death are not denied, but are appropriated for the optimistic project: we are tacitly asked to think of the greater good.So, over fifty years on, with a completely different world view, does this film have any value, or meaning for us? Oh yes. Turn the sound down. Marvel at the sheer FACT (not in a history book, or a film) of history in motion, before your very eyes. Mere statistics now walk and talk and smile like actual people. This not all. The aerial sequences are astoundingly beautiful. There is a remarkable purity of geometry to the air formations, making you think they were set up by Wyler. The film stock, neither Technicolour gloss, nor the vapidly clear image of modern film, gives a bleached, dream-like effect to the spectacle, making you forget that in a few moments these machines are going to murder women and children.There is also something curiously moving about the transition from the smooth, controllable base footage to the elliptical chaos of the bombing and subsequent dogfight. We are told at the beginning that much of this footage was lost because of over-exposure; its absence - making us confront in our much more potent imaginations what really happened - is a beautiful triumph of the power of imagery, editing and ellipsis (i.e. art) over the sterile, fascist hectoring of the narrator's words.