The Rear Gunner

I was watching a movie off my DVR where it seems as though TCM screwed up the scheduling, as they had a full hour after the movie to fill. They did this with three World War II shorts, and today I'm going to mention the first one I saw, The Rear Gunner.

In the days after Pearl Harbor, lots of men were drafted, such as Pee Wee Williams (Burgess Meredith). When asked what he'd like to do to serve the military, he mentions how he'd like to be involved with one of those "flying fortresses". The military, in its infinite wisdom, assigns him to be an aviation mechanic; presumably he worked on farm equipment back home.

He's noticed by Lt. Ames (Ronald Reagan), mostly for being short. That's an advantage in aviation where space is at a premium. Having had to shoot crows as pests, Pee Wee is told by Ames that perhaps he could try being a gunner. Of course, you knew this was going to happen considering the title of the short. Pee Wee is a natural at this, and goes to a five-week training course run by an instructor sergeant (Tom Neal); also in the course is Benny (played by Dane Clark at the very beginning of his career under his childhood name of Bernard Zanville).

Eventually they graduate and go off to active duty, earning distinction because this is a short released in 1943 and the whole point of shorts like this was to increase morale on the home front and hopefully get more men to enlist. It's well enough made, certainly for what it's trying to do. Looking back on it from 80 years in the future, it may feel pedestrian since there's relatively little going on here. And, to be honest, there were wartime shorts that were better. Certainly, The Rear Gunner could have been improved with Technicolor. But Hollywood and the military's Motion Picture Units were turning out stuff like this so quickly that large budgets and things like Technicolor weren't always a consideration. As it is, The Rear Gunner is an interesting little time capsule.

Note that sources list the original running time as 26 minutes. It was edited down to 20 minutes at some point and that shorter edit is what TCM ran.