REVIEW: Tuskegee Airmen story 'Red Tails' big on action

The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of African-American fighter pilots who were trained despite the racism entrenched in the U.S. armed services at the time, were deployed in action, and achieved fame and many decorations for their skills against German pilots. which included engaging and shooting down Messerschmitt Me 262s, the first jet fighters. So successful were they at providing escort for American bombers that the white bomber pilots requested them — contradicting a “study” at the time that claimed “Negroes lack the intelligence to operate heavy machinery.”

Their story has been told before, in a 1995 HBO movie that stuck close to the facts and included much material about the training of the airmen in the racist South of the 1940s.

See a photo gallery of Tuskegee Airmen from Colorado Springs who held a meet and greet Thursday to promote the film.

That film represented the first time the fliers became widely known to the American public.
Now, George Lucas has personally financed a big-budget, mainstream action movie about the Airmen in the hope of reaching a larger audience. He has had “Red Wings,” directed by Anthony Hemingway, under development for 23 years, and credit is due for his perseverance.

The emphasis here is on “action,” and this is not so much a social or historical document as a war thriller. A great deal of the film is devoted to aerial dogfights, with POV shots of the pursuit of enemy fighters. The combat dialogue comes down to many close-ups of pilots in flight masks, barking brief words of command. The dramatic scenes on the ground in Europe don’t have much substance, although there are effective scenes showing bureaucratic infighting at the top of the Air Corps’ chain of command.

George Lucas is known for his enthusiasm about combat dogfights, and is said to have studied William Wellman’s early Oscar winner “Wings” (1927) and its footage of World War I aerial battles. He used it as a template for  creating the dogfights in the “Star Wars” movies. Now substitute 1940s fighters for spaceships, move them closer to Earth, and you have the audience appeal of this movie.

The cast is large and distinguished, a roll call led by such actors as Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The film is entertaining. Audiences are likely to enjoy it. The scenes of aerial combat are skillfully done and exciting. It makes the point that the airmen were skilled and courageous, and played a historic role in the eventual integration of our armed services. “Red Tails” could have done more than that by more firmly establishing the atmosphere of the time in the Jim Crow South that surrounded most of the airmen in their childhoods. They had a higher mountain to climb than many white pilots, and reached higher on its slopes.

At a premiere of his film, and again on “The Daily Show,” Lucas has said he financed the movie himself because Hollywood doesn’t want to finance expensive movies with all-black casts. “They don’t believe there’s any foreign market for it, and that’s 60 percent of their profit,” he told Jon Stewart. “I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’” He also made an oblique reference to the aerial combat footage: “This is as close as you’ll get to Episode VII.”

True enough, no doubt. But Lucas begs the question: Did this have to be an expensive movie? Was the purpose to make a blockbuster, or to make a statement? I imagined a film that contained more history and drama — and that was angrier. Years ago my father had a friend who flew bombers over Germany. He spoke of the immediate reality that each mission could very likely be the last. Here, I didn’t feel fear as the pilots took off. They had pride, patriotism and zeal, yes, but their hands must have been sweating and their guts must have been churning. I would have appreciated their thoughtful late-night conversations about the meaning of it all. In Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna” there is a flashback to a scene of black American soldiers in the Deep South being refused service by a restaurant that does accept Nazis from a nearby POW camp.

I’m also not sure Lucas did his movie a favor by speaking so widely about the industry’s reluctance to finance all-black casts. If I were a PR person, I’d advise him to talk up the selling points (“In a way, this is ‘Episode VII!’”) and give the movie a chance to open.