The Fighting Lady
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Movie Reviews of The Fighting Lady
Movie Review: Great Addition To Any WW2 Library.
Summary: 5 Stars
Most of the footage in this documentary is original, I have not seen it in places like "War In The Pacific" or "The World At War". It is a great narrated look at live and operations in an aircraft carrier. The Great Wing Camera footage alone justifies the purchase.
Movie Review: TIME FOR ANOTHER AIR WARFARE DOCUMENTARY !!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
THIS MOVIE WAS DEFINITELY A DOCUMENTARY OF A WARSHIP CARRIER OF THE WESTERN PACIC DURING WORLD WAR II.....SINCE HAVING SERVED IN THE NAVY SEVERAL YEARS AGO....I GOT TO LEARN ABOUT CARRIER LIFE ABOARD THIS WARSHIP, AND ITS MEN...ESPECIALLY ITS AIR WING COMPONENT....Movie Review: Stupendous
Summary: 5 Stars
An outstanding example of the wartime documentary, in color no less. Not exactly politically correct, but what do you expect? We didn't start the damn war.Movie Review: Valuable perspective
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this movie to be interesting because the viewer gets to see the young men working with what was the technology of the time.Movie Review: The Fighting Lady
Summary: 4 Stars
Released in late 1944, winner of an Academy Award as Best Documentary in 1945, William Wyler's THE FIGHTING LADY portrays life aboard a newly commissioned aircraft carrier as it wends its way southward from its eastern seaboard home port, crosses the Panama Canal, and streams westward to join the naval war in the Pacific theater of operations. Finally, we are on board planes and boat during a number of enemy engagements.
The War Office commissioned a number of these documentaries during the war. They were made by top-notch Hollywood directors, including John Huston, John Ford, and Wyler. Probably the best known of these is Frank Capra's early, five-part `Why We Fight' series, the first of which was released in 1942. I've read that audiences grew increasingly tired of them. War-weariness had set in, newsreels delivered much more current information, and the typical 60-minute run time was hard to fit onto a playbill. A Saint or a Boston Blackie or even a Blondie episode would have been a lot easier to sell than a war documentary depicting events that occurred over a year and a half ago.
That said, THE FIGHTING LADY is pretty good. The ship's real name is never revealed. I guess (wasn't told this, either) that it's a Yorktown-class carrier. The camera gets around fairly comfortably, imparting an idea of how enclosed and self contained life on an aircraft carrier was. Crewmen bake bread, shave steaks off whole quarters of beeves. The deck hangar is as huge as a cathedral. Early on the ship's captain exhorts the crew to greater efficiency, pilots are granted the luxury of pre-battle breakfasts of steak and eggs, and the mutt mascot wags around in a miniature life vest when the ship enters more dangerous waters. The approach is admiring, the tone (with voice-over narration by Robert Taylor) is determined, and the general impression, by 1943, is one of overwhelming material superiority. By 1945 the subject had changed from `why we fight' to `how we won.'
This is the first full color WWII documentary I've seen, and one of the few produced during the war. After the ship reaches the war zone we're shown a lot of footage of Japanese planes being shot out of sky by the ship's aak-aak guns, land and sea targets strafed and bombed via movie cameras strapped onto airplane guns, and that fellow with the flags on the flight deck guiding the planes in for the always hazardous deckside landings. Although cameras are smaller, lighter, and steadier today, TFL contains some of the supplest photography I've seen in a contemporary documentary. It's visually interesting, and not the worst of the lot by a long shot.