Aces High

What was it like to be a fighter pilot in WW1?

An inexperienced young Brit straight from the academy (Peter Firth) arrives on the Western front in northern France to assist in the air war against the Germans during WW1. One week in the lives of the pilots of a Royal Flying Corps squadron is chronicled as they struggle with the stresses & risks intrinsic to their profession. Malcolm McDowell plays the Major, Christopher Plummer the Captain and Simon Ward an anxiety-stricken colleague.

"Aces High" (1976) came out a decade after the exceptional The Blue Max (1966) with the former addressing British pilots and the latter Germans. While Blue Max is all-around superior and more epic, Aces High aint no slouch. It successfully bring...

Perhaps because many of the cast here all look so very young, this film has an extra potency as a depiction of some of the inexperienced fliers who fought in the Great War. It all centres around the young "Crawford" (Simon Ward) who joins a squadron commanded by "Gresham" (Malcolm McDowell) and his adjutant "Sinclair" (Christopher Plummer). Green in the extreme, he finds himself fighting for his life every time he is airborne, and he must also balance the increasingly delicate needs of his commander who must deal, on a daily basis, with the mounting death toll amongst his Royal Flying Corps airmen. Jack Gold manages to capture well the sense of foreboding and the nerve-end existence of these youngsters as well as offering us some spectacula...