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Air Cadet
R2 - United Kingdom - Simply Media Review written by and copyright: Matthew Crossman (19th March 2016). |
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The Film
 Joe Czanoczek (Alex Nichol), Russ Coulter (Richard Long), Walt Carver (Robert Arthur) and Jerry Connell (James Best) are new recruits to the air cadet academy. They all enrol on the same day at Randolph Field. Joe is already a sergeant in the army but dreams of flying commercial airlines. Russ had a brother that was in the air force whom has since died and Jerry is now trying to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Things get off to a bad start for Joe when he has several run-ins with the Upper Classman in charge (an early film for Rock Hudson). Upper Classman appears to be picking on Walt and Joe does not like it but Walt asks Joe not to interfere. Walt comes from a privileged background and has always had everything done for him. This is Walt’s chance to see if he can stand up for himself and take the abuse. All but Jerry manage to pass the academy. Jerry, who already had two hundred flying hours behind him when he joined, seems to have picked up some bad flying habits and has been let go. Jerry chooses to go into navigation for the air force instead. The three other men then transfer to Williams Air Force base. There they meet Major Jack Page (Stephen McNally). Major Page has been suffering recently from his experiences in the war and it is affecting him psychologically. This, in turn has affected his Wife, Janet Page (Gail Russell) who is now estranged from her Husband. One evening at The Phoenix Club Russ dancers with Janet and starts to fall for her. Janet is confused by her conflicting feelings for her Husband and entertains Russ to a degree. Out of the three friends Russ is the last one to take his first solo flight. He has been edgy and nervous, a direct result of his feelings for Janet (although all of their liaisons, if there have been any, have been hinted at and are completely off screen). Russ performs brilliantly on his solo flight but upon landing another pilot lands on the wrong runway, Russ’ runway, causing Russ to take action and he runs his plane of the runway and damages it. This gives Major Page the opportunity to ‘wash him out’ of the Air Cadets but something in Russ’ past gives Russ the upper hand. I have to admit I’m a sucker for these old black and white films. I assumed that ‘Air Cadet’ would be about the Second World War but I was wrong. This film is more of a human drama set on an air base. A sort of ‘From Here to Eternity’ lite, if you like. It helps that all the footage is actually shot on the actual airbases and all of the extras seen are actual servicemen (in fact, the eagle eyed amongst you, may just spot Gus Grissom in an scene early in the film before he became famous as an astronaut) . The footage used of the aeroplanes in action was all filmed specifically for ‘Air Cadet’, so no stock footage, and this gives the movie an added feel of realism. It also features Rock Hudson in an early career performance (‘Air Cadet’ was his tenth feature film) as Upper Classman who spends the first half an hour of the movie barking orders at our protagonists before disappearing from the rest of the film. The story by Robert Soderberg is a fairly straight forward one but one of the first post war films I have seen that deals with post traumatic distress. This angle is quite intriguing for a film that is over sixty years old although some of the psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo spouted by the resident psychiatrist Major Jim Evans (Parley Baer) is now well out of date. Whilst ‘Air Cadet’ offers nothing relatively new it is it’s realism that makes it stand out from the crowd.
Video
The DVD presents the film in it’s original aspect ratio of 1.37:1 (The Academy ratio). The film is in black and white and overall it’s a decent transfer for a film of this age. There are moments when the image blurs slightly at the side of the picture but nothing too distracting. The image has had no restoration work done to it so expect plenty of scratches and reel change burns but again nothing that will hinder the enjoyment of the main feature. The final reel suffers the most damage. Personally I actually like these defects as it takes me back to the days of celluloid and projectors before the perfection of digital. You can almost imagine watching ‘Air Cadet’ in your local fleapit in the 1950’s or at the drive in. There are no subtitles available on this DVD.
Audio
A simple Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono option is all that is available. The dialogue is perfectly clear throughout but lacks a bit of ‘oomph’ when it comes to the engines of the aircraft. The score is subdued and melodramatic and like the picture quality the sound track does not appear to have had any improvements made on it. So there is the occasional hiss, pop and crackle but again, nothing too distracting. It’s a fully centred soundtrack, as I imagine it was back in 1951, and more than adequate. There are no subtitles of any kind available on this disc.
Extras
None. As bare bones as they come.
Overall
It maybe taking it a bit too far to call this film an undiscovered ‘gem’ but it’s a interesting slice of different times. The film stays true to all the stereotypes of the 1950’s when men were men who drank hard, flew fast planes and basically kept a stiff upper lip. The women (actually, that should be woman) are there to be generally ignored, except when looked upon as sex objects to be fawned over and wearing severely pointy bras. The real attraction of this film is the footage on the airbases and the footage of the fighter planes. So many times films of this era would use stock footage or studio footage with badly imposed backgrounds but ‘Air Cadet’ has none of that. In fact, now I think about it, ‘Top Gun’ is almost a re-make of ‘Air Cadet’ even down to the love angle. So if you want to see what Tom Cruise looked like had he been around in the 1950’s then seek it out.
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