By coincidence, this film was the next entry on my to-watch list following The Man from Colorado, a 1948 Western about a former Union officer driven mad by the Civil War. While those movies contrast wildly as far as budget and artistry are concerned, the two films are similar in many ways. Both of them are about good men who War makes into monsters; consequently both films deal thematically with the dark side of humanity that lurks inside everyone, the side that causes Wars to begin with. As such they can both be interpreted as anti-war films, but Ace of Aces is much more directly about protesting conflict. That directness certainly makes it a bit dumber than The Man from Colorado, but that doesn't mean the film's wiping its drool off the floor. What makes Ace of Aces so enjoyable and indeed compelling is its emotional intensity and earnestness about its message.
Rocky Thorne is a sculptor engaged to Nancy, a fellow intellectual. They share rambling, pretentious conversations with each other but generally seem to be good kids. Then America enters World War I, and there's a need for fighter pilots. Nancy turns on Rocky when he dismisses the value of the War, and that's enough to make him enlist. Despite his early hesitance, Rocky faces his duty with honor, and a terrible change begins to occur. It turns out Rocky really likes killing...and he's willing to sacrifice whatever parts of himself don't apply to that. What's more, he becomes secluded, refusing to let anyone else service his plane or guns. Not even Nancy can turn him back, even though her own job as a nurse has taught her how foolish it was to support this war. Is it too late for Rocky, or can some new horror yet reach and change his heart?
Many of the old cliches are rolled out for this one. Before his enlistment, Rocky compares the marching troops outside his soldier to lemmings--at great length. At such great length, in fact, that I couldn't help but envision an enormous red alarm flashing over the whole screen, shouting "SYMBOLISM" the whole time. Adding to the SYMBOLISM is the fact that Rocky's unit is singing a song to the tune of a funeral march when he enters the bunk. It's moments like this which couple with the occasionally over-flowery dialogue to make the whole thing seem heavy-handed. But I think this hamfistedness comes from a place of caring.
There are a plenty of strange details about this film which make it a joy to watch from the perspective of one who like eccentric movies, while also showing, as those eccentricities often do, a precision and care that went into this movie's forging. When Rocky is meeting his squadron for the first time, each of them have a witty or "witty" introduction/sobriquet. The best being "Tombstone Terry the Tennessee Terror, aka Dracula." I could read 80 years of comics centered on a WWI ace with that name. There's also the fact that each of the pilots has an animal mascot--a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a goat, and Rocky's own lion cub. These animals aren't just for cheap gags--they, too, bring symbolism, because they start fighting around the time that Rocky's violent obsessions start ripping the unit apart.
The film's heart serves it well, as those trips into eccentricity also lead to genuine darkness. Witness Rocky whipping a man with an ammo belt after he failed to load it properly, sending gouts of blood gushing from his crushed skull. Witness Rocky turning Nancy's pro-war arguments on her to convince her to have drunken, sweaty beer sex with him (which is truly skin-crawling by the way). And finally witness Rocky turning straight again after being forced to spend the night with a German teenager he shot down, whom he eventually helps commit suicide when it becomes clear he's got nothing but a slow death ahead of him. War. Is. Hell. It's tough to watch the early scenes where Nancy is trying to justify to Rocky what seems to him to be coldhearted murder, and remember that that was the common attitude of the day. Of course Rocky's arguments, that war is pointless and without true glory in the end, make sense, but when this War broke out people put so much of their pride and fear into their nationalism that relationships really were destroyed over "dishonor," for whatever meaning honor has when you're up against lung-dissolving gas.
Here the movie shines the brightest, because it's ultimately a film concerned with how war happens. The answer I feel it gives to this question is "peer pressure." Rocky is a gentle man largely ruled by his love for Nancy, but Nancy is able to use that to lever him into doing something he's afraid of, by forcing him to face what seems an even greater fear. Once this layer kicks in and pushes him out to the barracks, the encouragement becomes positive: he's rewarded by the comradery and praise of his fellow pilots, who all treat each other like brothers. It's notable that even when his squadron turns on him for his change in behavior, it's not enough to turn him back to good--but he does change his behavior when they turn on him once more after he announces he's leaving to take on a prosperous teaching job instead. In this case, this later scene, where Rocky loses all his friends in the squad for accepting his CO's offer, shows that the positive reinforcement of the squad's brotherhood was really enforced by implicit violence this whole time. The friendship of the armed forces, the film seems to say, only goes as far as one friend is useful to another. That's pretty cold, given that in my experience the military does create sincere friendships as well, but these pilots stand in for the war they fight and the horror it in turn represented, and how entirely without honor and compassion that conflict was. I know this probably makes me seem dumb, but it was really nice to see a movie that flat-out condemned World War I with such vitriol, especially one made in such a precarious era as the inter-war period. All wars are fucking horrible, but that so many of us still rank World War I as one of the top worst points in all of human history shows that it in particular was especially fucking horrible. It deserves to be condemned in big bold letters.
This film was something of a marvel for me; an airplane thriller with some serious war drama. And trauma. Watch it as I did, with The Man from Colorado, or maybe with another airplane thriller, and you've got a good day carved out for yourself.
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