Memphis Belle [DVD] [1990]

During World War II, the young crew of the Memphis Belle, a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, successfully executes 24 extremely dangerous bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe. These courageous flyers, most of them scarcely out of their teens, have taken to the air in defense of their country and know that the odds are one in three of them will not return home. Now, the crewmembers only have to complete one more mission before they can return home to the United States. But their last mission will be their most dangerous.

Filmed in color, The Memphis Belle has long been held up as a "model" wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 41 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride in the fact that the Belle has completed 25 successful missions, there's no phony heroism, no grandstanding, no flagwaving. As calm-voiced narrator Ed Kern explains, the Belle has a job to do, and it does it, and that's all. The danger facing these Flying Fortresses is underlined, but never overemphasized, by brief glimpses of those doomed ships that didn't make it back. Memphis Belle was directed by William Wyler, who also flew several missions with the crew, manning the camera himself at considerable risk. The overall excellence of The Memphis Belle is even more obvious when compared to the hokey fictionalized 1990 movie version of the Belle's 25th mission.