lafayette escadrille

Hi, can anyone tell me if the 1957 clint eastwood movie lafeyette escadrille has any historical accuracy. The only way I can watch it is if I buy it online and I don't want to waste the money if it's unrealistic. Thanks

[Ira_Silverman]

Hi Ken:

First of all, it wasn't a Clint Eastwood movie, it was a Tab Hunter movie with Eastwood in a cameo. That should say it all.

But it doesn't. It was an embarassment to the surviving members of the LE, who uniformly hated it, and William Wellman spent the rest of his life apologizing for it.

Any way you spell it, it comes out D-O-G.

BTW, in addition to being a bad film, I also found it unwatchably boring. That makes it unique, to me at least, among WW1 flying flicks.

VBR,

Ira

Ken:
I'm afraid Ira still likes the film better than do I! Get this plot twist: An American deserter kills a French soldier, finds a prostitute who shelters him and works as a pimp before rejoining his fellows in the L.E. To quote Edwin Parsons: "It's an insult to the memory or our dead". For some reason the character played by Eastwood is named after Geo. C. Moseley, who flew with the French and then the U.S. Navy in France, but who was never in the L.E. Moseley I've been told walked out halfway through. What a shame to waste the name of the fabled L.E. on such trash. Wellman, who directed it- flew SPADs with the French, ahould have known better, so was/is doubly damned by all who found it so hateful. Wellman said he wanted to name it "C'est la Guerre" but was overruled by Warners execs. He still never should have used any reference to the L.E. under any conditions with the script as filmed. Do you know of the James McConnell letters on the 'net. Just search under that name: most touching thoughts from a fine writer and great human being. Regards! Lee
PS. Ira: 74 days BST.

[Barrett]

Ira and Lee are exactly right. This stinker is SO bad that I didn't even watch it again the last time it was on TV, years ago. There's very little flying or even aviation in it, and I seriously doubt that it could have been retrieved (by The Blue Max standards) even with a Towel Scene.
In the past couple of years there was a documentary on Wellman, and his son was hard pressed to say anything supportive of the film.

It's two movies.
You can see the one Wellman wanted to make: the training scenes, the supporting actors like David Janssen and Eastwood, the weird nature of wartime romance. Wellman alluded to it in his autobiography--some of the movie was about himself.
Then there's the movie that Warners made him make: Tab Hunter, the cheap effects, tha happy ending, the title. He was so disgusted by it all that he quit making movies.
I can see why people were disgusted by it, but I can't accept that it was because the portrayal of wartime pilots as anything less that church deacons at a temperance convention was a perversion of the truth.
Nor can I see Wellman as a "false" claimant to the world-eternal honor of being a "real" Lafayette Escadrille pilot. By the time he joined the LFC, posting to S.124 was purely by chance, and Wellman had a better record during his time at the front than a lot of N/S.124 pilots.
As for the historical record, I don't recall anyone protesting the caricature of Ray Bridgeman that appeared in Cross and Cockade and other works at the time. It was left to James Hudson years later.
What sticks in my mind is the "roll-call" in the barracks, spoken by Wellman himself--better than the entirety of something like "Top Gun."
Remember Wellman for that, or "Battleground".