Bad Movie of the Week

Number 144 of a series

Searched YouTube for another Bat Movie. Found one!

From 1953 it’s Fighter Attack, and it is bad.

Of course production standards may have been different 70 years ago, but I’m not giving any slack. Wikipedia has as good a synopsis as I can give, so I will provide some commentary.

• Sterling Hayden as Major Steve Pitt
• J. Carrol Naish as Bruno
• Joy Page as Nina
• Kenneth Tobey as Captain George Patterson
• Arthur Caruso as Aldo
• Frank DeKova as Benedetto
• Paul Fierro as Don Gaetano
• Maurice Jara as Ettore
• Tony Dante as Mario
• David Leonard as Father Paola in the credits (also referred to as Paolo by screen characters)
• Jeffrey Stone as Lt. Gross

It’s 1946, the year after the war ended, and former Major Steve Pitt is back in Italy to recover some past memories. He gets a ride in a horse taxi out to a church in the Italian mountains. He’s looking for Father Paulo, but the new priest tells him Paulo was executed by the Germans before they left.

And the bulk is a flash-back. Pitt leads a flight of what appear to be Jugs (P-47s). They are bombing and strafing German supply trains and trucks in support of American and British troops coming up from the south. The squadron is flying out of Corsica, which the allies took back from the Germans in 1943. It is now 1944.

A close-up view so you can see why this movie is titled Fighter Attack, because there is hardly any air action.

Anyhow, Major Pitt has flown is 100th and final mission, but the new commander, Captain George Patterson, has failed to return from a mission. Pitt suits up again, and takes on the follow-up raid and has to bail out in occupied territory.

He escapes capture, and that night he seeks shelter in an Italian house. The husband is willing, but the wife is more sensible. The Germans will take retribution if they help the Allies. He leaves and is accosted by a young woman with a machine gun. Take it from me. Do not say no to a woman with a machine gun.

She is Nina, and she takes him to a cabin in the mountains, where her compatriots are hiding out. They are resistance fighters, and regardless of what you might think, these guys were never very idealistic. The ponder over whether to turn him over to the Germans for money.

But they allow him to hang out with them, and Pitt and the girl get really close. So close you can hardly fit a condom between them.

The battle scenes are totally unrealistic. We see the group on patrol, sticking as close together as a family on a picnic. No combat team was ever that foolish.

Bruno is the leader, and he knocks out a German half-track by throwing a German “potato masher” in front of it. This supposedly kills all the Germans, because there is no follow-up gunfire and no further sign of the germans.

Absolutely not. A grenade exploding on the ground near an armored vehicle will not kill it occupants. Probably not even injure any of them.

There is a lot of stuff like this in the movie. The fighters face off against German platoons and come out on top time after time.

Nina takes Pitt to the church, and George is there. He survived, and the priest has been hiding him out. George joins up.

But there is a fly in the ointment. There always is. Too many German patrols are snooping out the cabin. Somebody is selling them out. Bruno forces the men to take a vote. Somebody votes for Nina, but the rest vote for Aldo, who has been making advances on Nina, which advances had been repeatedly rebuffed.

They tie Aldo to a chair, and about that time the Germans attack. They shoot it out with the Germans and escape, except for one who is killed. The Germans find Aldo tied up and shoot him.

Now gang converges on the tunnel, which had been the elusive target of Pitt’s squadron all this time. They prepare to launch an attack. Pitt pulls a flare out of his survival kit and fires it off, alerting his squadron, which just then arrives, looking for the tunnel.

There is a gunfight with the Germans, and Bruno is killed. Bombs blast other German positions, and the partisans shoot up the squad commanding a German 88 gun. They point the gun into the tunnel and let loose a round. The tunnel is destroyed, preventing supplies from reaching the German lines.

Father Paulo leads the two American officers to a boat to take them to Corsica, and Pitt and Nina kiss goodbye.

It’s 1946 again, and Pitt finishes his recount of his adventures. Nina arrives, and the two rekindle their love affair. We suspect there will be marriage.

If you watched this movie and didn’t notice, Major Pitt is a jerk. Prior to his last mission he is telling about getting back to his fiancée in America. He will send her a note telling her to start shopping for furniture. Then he meets Nina, and all that is past.

Also, it’s now two years since he saw Nina, a hot-blooded Italian Catholic girl. And she is not married with a bunch of kids already? 

Perhaps I’m misinformed. We see Pitt offering American cigarettes to the band of fighters. What? He brought cigarettes with him on a fighter strike? He was going to smoke one in the cockpit, taking his oxygen mask off from time to time to take a puff? He was carrying cigarettes in case he got shot down and needed something to offer the Italians? Who goes into combat expecting to get shot down?

The film shows many views through the cockpit windscreen. The pilots are strafing trucks and trains. The views are from gunsight cameras during the war, projected in front of the pilot’s view. Makes for much realism.

There is this tunnel. What for? There are no railroad tracks leading to it, no highway, not even a well-constructed road. Why is the tunnel there? Where does it go? The Americans have been trying to locate it all this time to bomb it and thereby stifle the supplies to the Germans lines. If it were a real tunnel, then it existed before the war or else was just constructed. If it existed prior to the war, then our military planners already knew the location. If it were just now constructed, then the signs of construction activity would have given away its position to aerial surveillance, or else spies would have reported its location. This is supposedly close to the Allied front line.

They go to great risk to get the downed pilots to Corsica by boat. The Allied lines are closer. That should have been safer. Corsica is over 50 miles from the mainland at the nearest point. That’s a long boat ride over contested waters.

For a real story of an American pilot escaping from behind enemy lines read Chuck Yeager’s book. He hooked up with the Resistance in France, and they got him to the Pyrenees on the way to Spain. A German patrol discovered him and another pilot and opened fire. The other guy was severely wounded, and Yeager wrapped him up and set him down on an icy road to slide toward Spain. Once in neutral Spain Yeager had negotiate his way back to England, where he got back into the fight. Nobody attempted boating him across the Channel.

Watch on YouTube (with commercials) if it is still up.