Not quite Ace of Base

Over the Memorial Day weekend, TCM ran a bunch of military-themed movies, as always. One that I hadn't blogged about before i Ace of Aces, so I recorded it and sat down to watch recently.

Richard Dix plays Rex Thorne, an artist in 1917 who's in love with the daughter of a fairly well-to-do family, Nancy Adams (Elizabeth Allan). This being 1917, you know that the US is about to get dragged into World War I, although of course at the time the movie ws released in 1933 the war was only known as the Great War because World War II was still several years away.

For no good reason, everybody immediately gets filled with patriotic fervor, or at least the desire to fight in a war a continent away that doesn't really seem to be any of the US's business. The only one who doesn't want to fight is Rex, leading Nancy to break off their engagement as she goes off to Europe to be a nurse.

Rex, embittered by this, decides that he's going to volunteer to become a flyboy, even though there's no evidence that he had any ability to fly before the war, and he arrives fairly late in the game considering how many Americans are already there, commanded by Capt. Blake (Ralph Bellamy), who gets a promotion to Major by the end of the movie.

After some training not shown in the movie, Rex, now christened with the nickname Rocky, gets to go up with one of the squadrons and fight the Germans. At first, he can't bring himself to shoot, but this quickly changes, and Rex finds that he gets a taste for blood. A taste that frightens everybody else, as he wants to go up on patrol alone, even though this seems rather dangerous and ill-advised.

Rex meets Nancy while on leave in Paris, and isn't so sure he likes her any more as the fighting experience has changed him. The war seems to have changed Nancy less, and she just wants Rex to love her.

I'm sorry that this is a rather brief review, but Ace of Aces is a movie that just doesn't have a whole lot to discuss. It's an old formula, and more or less works even though other movies have done it better. Dix is frankly too old for the role, and if you think too hard you'll find a lot of plot holes. So don't think too hard and just sit back and enjoy.