weezeralfalfa Accomplishes it's purposes of providing more Technicolor exposure of Fox's ravishing young starlet: Gene Tierney, while providing a drama relating to the then current training of pilots, primarily for the Army Air Corps. Gene , at 22, looks especially beautiful in this film, as in the later Technicolor "Leave Her to Heaven". In the beginning, she's the girl of instructor Steve Britt(Preston Foster), but later becomes enamored of British trainee Peter Stackhouse(John Sutton), who is almost dismissed from the school, save for the intervention of Britt. Britt seems not too upset that Jean went for the younger man, as he was 20 years her senior......I was curious why the bright yellow and blue Stearman Model 75 biplanes were used as trainers, whereas the pilots were going to fly monoplanes in battle. Reportedly, these planes had a reputation for being easy for beginners to fly, relatively forgiving, and rugged. The pilots flying the combat planes in the fadeout were termed Thunder Birds. Interestingly, these fighters looked to me like probable P-47s, nicknamed Thunderbolts. ...... Brit John Sutton was a real life adventure seeker, born in India. He was most often cast as 'the other man' or villain, but here he's the winner, as he was in the prior film "Hudson's Bay" , again, with Gene as his ladylove.....The director, William Wellman, bargained with Darryl Zanuck to direct this film if he were allowed to direct the very controversial project "The Ox Bow Incident". As anticipated, the latter film was a box-office flop, but is highly regarded today. See the present film at YouTube

bkoganbing When William Wellman does a film about his favorite subject aviation you can always be sure that the flying sequences will be among the best ever done in a given era. Wellman who was a member of the famed Lafayette Escadrille in World War I made all his aviation pictures with precision, care, and love. Thunder Birds: Soldiers Of The Air is no exception.Old World War I ace Preston Foster is to old for combat in this new World War, but he volunteers to be a civilian instructor at ThunderBird Field in Arizona for a new generation of fliers. The head of the base Jack Holt assigns Foster to Reginald Denny's British air cadets doing their training for the RAF in America. One of them is John Sutton who is the son of a British ace from the last war and a friend of Foster's who was killed.It doesn't look like Sutton has the right stuff and that's the considered opinion of all save Foster. Sutton does have some issues but he's determined to carry on in the family aviation tradition even though his original training is for the medical corps. His brother was killed on a bombing run into Europe and Sutton feels this is what he must do.Complicating things is the fact that both Foster and Sutton fall for Gene Tierney. Still Foster keeps his job and love life separate, but he's old enough and wise enough to keep it apart.Darryl Zanuck splurged for color on this film, not something normally done in the wartime cinema. It always seemed that Fox did use color more than any other of the major studios. It certainly adds to Bill Wellman's aviation sequences. Look fast and you'll see Peter Lawford as one of the British cadets. And in a flashback sequence as Sutton's grandmother Dame May Witty borrows a bit from her character from Mrs. Miniver and shows she hasn't lost any of the right stuff herself.Aviation buffs will love Thunder Birds: Soldiers Of The Air. The rest of us will find it more than acceptable.

museumofdave The man who directed this film about aerial training, William "Wild Bill" Wellman, was a daring pilot himself, and was not only responsible for Wings, the first Oscar winning feature, but also helmed The Ox Bow Incident, Public Enemy and 1937's A Star Is Born, and compared to those classics, this is rather weak tea, rescued by Technicolor, a 22 year old Gene Tierney, and its historical value as a WWII flag-waver. Studio director Daryl Zanuck wanted to give Gene Tierney, his doll-like starlet, plenty of exposure; here she was just a few years away from her indelible performances in Laura and Leave Her To Heaven; Tierney is paired with old reliable Preston Foster in a tale set in the Arizona desert, where the brilliantly colored blue and yellow prop planes dazzle the eye, set against desert sands and clear blue sky; the story is essentially older man vs. younger flier (sometimes leading man John Sutton) who vie for the heart of the fair maid, but the side benefits of the film outweigh the tired plot elements: how often do we see young Chinese and British airmen in Arizona being trained by Americans? How things change!

pzanardo "Thunder Birds" is an innocuous movie of war propaganda, made by W.A. Wellmann, a first- rate director, with his usual professionalism. The locations are beautiful, the Technicolor is outstanding, and the flying scenes are accurately shot. The story is standard, a nice blend of adventure-action and comedy, with some good emotional scenes in the part placed in England, dominated by Dame May Witty. What makes "Thunder Birds" special, and its message stronger, is the use of Gene Tierney as a symbol. Yes, she is called to represent exactly "what we fight for". We (the young men from America, Great Britain, China) fight for that dream of a girl, for her smile, for the hot dogs we devour with her, for her nylon stockings, for our freedom and prosperity that she embodies. And she doesn't leave us alone, like a damned arrogant European princess. She helps and supports us, with a merry smile and without any conceit. Here, among us, there's no room for the gruesome death-rhetoric of the barbarian killers we fight.To be honest, I admit that anyone out of the mass of splendid American actresses of the 1940s could play the role of Gene Tierney in "Thunder Birds", with excellent results. But only with the Goddess of Beauty, shining on the screen, all the parameters go to infinity.