![]() Director: Michael Curtiz Year Of Release: 1941 Plot: After operating on a pilot who crashed after blacking out during a high speed dive, Navy Lt. Doctor Doug Lee decides to become a flight surgeon, learning to fly and hoping to find a solution to the altitude sickness thats becoming an increasing problem for dive bombers. However Lee meets resistance from the military brass and other pilots, who think hes a grandstander and vulture, and dont understand how much help the pneumatic suits hes working on could be. |
Dive Bomber is one of those films thats rarely mentioned when people talk about old films, but which holds a fairly unique position in movie history. Rather like the little heralded The Big Trail, which was John Waynes first starring role and the birth of widescreen filmmaking, Dive Bomber also holds a couple of notable firsts.
Perhaps most importantly, in some respects it was the start of modern colour filmmaking. While it wasnt the first colour movie (indeed, colour films, in many varying formats, are almost as old as cinema itself), it was the first to use film stock that captured all the colours on a single frame of film.
I suppose to explain this I ought to talk a bit about what people actually mean when they talk about old Technicolor movies. Of course Technicolor is a company, but when people talk about Gone With The Wind and Wizard Of Oz being Technicolor films, they not just referring to who made the film stock, but about the specific process used.
Whats better described as three-strip Technicolor is the process that was used most often in the 30s and 40s. This worked by running three strips of film through the camera. But if you do that, how do you end up with a colour movie? Well, once the light came into the camera, it was split by a prism and passed through filters and/or onto special stock, so that one piece of film recorded the green light, another magenta and the third blue. The benefit of this was that because each of the three strips recorded different wavelengths of light, it gave a far more accurate representation of the full colour spectrum than anything that had gone before (its also the reason forest greens and deep reds look so vibrant in old movies, because the three strip process was particularly good at rendering these).
After processing each strip, they were then optically recombined so they could be shown in cinemas as a colour movie.
However, there were some big drawbacks. For a start, splitting the light and passing it through prisms and filters meant the amount of light that actually reached the film stock was only a relatively small amount of what entered the camera. Because of this, huge amounts of illumination had to be used on film sets, to the point where several actors later claimed their vision was permanently and detrimentally affected by the intense lights needed for three-strip Technicolor movies.
Just as problematic was the size of the cameras. In order to run three film strips through the camera, the equipment was enormous, bulky and difficult to move (not to mention noisy and incredibly expensive), meaning location filming was difficult, and shooting in tight spaces pretty much impossible.
Then in the 1930s Kodak and Agfa started working on stock that recorded all three primary colours on one strip of film, but initially they only managed to make stock suitable for 8mm and 16mm amateur filmmakers. In 1941 Technicolor started producing a stock it called Monopack, which was a single strip colour film process that could be used in a normal 35mm camera (of the sort used for black and white filmmaking). However due to the state of colour filmmaking technology at the time, it was only suitable for location filming, because the higher grain made studio work impossible.
The first film to use this new stock was Dive Bomber. The Errol Flynn movie had special dispensation from the US armed forces to film inside their planes. While a specially designed rig was created so they could use the three strip process in some of the larger planes and onboard the carrier the USS Enterprise, the only way to film in some of the smaller aircraft and in tighter spaces was with the brand new Technicolor Monochrome.
Nowadays nearly all colour films, except those shot digitally, are shot on single-strip full colour stock, and it all started with Dive Bomber.
Now that Ive told you more about Technicolor than you ever wanted to know, there are a couple of other interesting things about Dive Bomber. The film was made and released less than a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with shooting taking place at the Hawaiian base and onboard navy ships and aircraft. Bizarrely, it was later claimed that Errol Flynn was an agent for the Nazis, who used the filming of Dive Bomber as a cover, so that he could gather info on Pearl Harbor and pass it to the fascists, who then handed it to the Japanese.
While theres absolutely no provable evidence for this, its based on what essentially amounts to a giant case of Chinese whispers. During the Second World War, Flynn came in for major criticism for playing combat heroes, even though, unlike many other stars, he didnt go off to fight himself. The criticism was largely unwarranted. Flynn wouldnt have been allowed to fight even if hed wanted to (and he apparently tried to enlist quite hard), due to the fact he had tuberculosis and malaria, as well as a back problem.
However, Warner Bros. didnt want the public to think their swashbuckling action hero was a medical mess and so suppressed any news of his health problems. Flynn ended up playing the WWII heroes in films as he considered it his part of the war effort, but he was nevertheless criticised in some quarters for taking the credit while other were off fighting and dying. Then, over the years, the rumours and innuendo continued until Charles Highams late 90s biography of the star claimed he was awfully fledged Nazi spy, who helped the Axis powers with their Pearl Harbor attack planning, due to his knowledge of the base and the Navys ships, gained while working on Dive Bomber.
The movie also found minor notoriety when Church Of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard erroneously claimed to have written the screenplay, and also said that it was based on a 1936 short story hed written (even though the story and film are completely different). In 1980, one of his acolytes, Gerald Armstrong, noticed that Hubbards name wasnt on the movies credits, despite what the Scientology leading was publicly saying. Hubbard initially said this was due to an oversight on the part of Warner Bros, but it turned out that in reality hed had nothing to do with the movie. This started a major odyssey, where Armstrong began to research Hubbards claims about his life story, finding more and more holes.
Then, after Armstrong took his fears to the Church bigwigs (it initially didnt shake his faith in Scientology, he just thought they should clear up any lies or factual errors in Hubbards biography, so it didnt come back to bite them), he was made a pariah, got sued and spent much of the next decade fighting legal challenges in court. Interestingly he wasnt sued over the facts hed uncovered, but in regards to just about anything else they thought they could possibly try to discredit him for. And it all started with Hubbards little while lie about Dive Bomber!
TIM ISAAC
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