THE WAY TO THE STARS (1945) *** If they would have stopped after killing off Michael Redgrave, maybe 45 minutes in, they would have had one of the most powerful war films ever made, and that without depicting violence. Michael is the incarnation of what every pilot aspires to, red-lining every positive category of the men drawn to that life. The gallows humour, the hop in his step, the guts so transcendent that they're more taken for granted than notable. What comes after that, fortunately, is also very good. It maintains a serious war strain, and acclaims the generation that sacrificed without being so boorish as to acknowledge what it's doing, and engages in a clever double-edged commentary on what the Americans and British thought (and the dynamic of what they still think) about each other. We brought 'em baseball and they thank us by running at the pitcher; we bring 'em real airplanes because they don't know what the hell they're doin'. They don't even know what real beer should even look like; we'd be horrified if our farm animals suffered that lack of sophistication (well, anyway the upper classes still think that). It's a romantic film, in that wonderful old-fashioned way that not only doesn't rely on sex, but refuses to acknowledge its existence. Babies arrive, but there's not the slightest hint of where they came from. I'm not saying that Jean Simmons' cameo as a ballroom singer lacks anything she wanted to put into it, I'm talking about the relationships between principals.
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