Director Jack Gold’s World War I set drama Aces High is one of cinema’s most underrated yet powerful antiwar films. Think of an antiwar film and movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter probably spring to mind. It’s no coincidence all of those films are set during the Vietnam War, which for many reasons has proven rich pickings for the antiwar genre, especially in American cinema.
World War I, the so-called Great War, has inspired its fair share of antiwar movies too. The Oscar-winning 1930 epic All Quiet On The Western Front is considered the definitive First World War movie, while Stanley Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory (1957) and Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) are similarly hailed as classics that use World War I as a backdrop for their antiwar sentiments. More recently, World War I set films like Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004) or Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) have also received critical acclaim.
Released in 1976, Aces High is one of the lesser-known and lauded World War I set antiwar movies. The film is based on a play by The Dam Busters screenwriter R.C. Sherriff titled Journey’s End, but swaps the play’s trench setting for a Royal Flying Corps airfield. It stars a post-Clockwork Orange and pre-Caligula Malcolm McDowell as a disillusioned squadron leader named Major John Gresham who is stationed in northern France and has hit the bottle to cope with the horrors of war, as have most of his fellow pilots in a desperate attempt to stay sane.
Set over the course of a week, Aces High follows idealistic new recruit Lieutenant Stephen Croft (Peter Firth) as he arrives at the airbase fresh from public school and is horrified to learn that Gresham – his former idol at school and his older sister’s boyfriend – has turned to drink. Over the short time-frame of Aces High, Croft witnesses many horrors himself and comes to understand the pressure his former hero is under as he matures from a naïve newbie into a solider.
In a cruel but wholly realistic twist typical of the high casualty rates of the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Croft celebrates his first victory but is killed shortly after when his plane collides mid-air with a German aircraft. Demonstrating the sheer futility of war, Aces High ends with a haunted Gresham preparing to welcome a bunch of new recruits who – like Croft – are sure to end up as cannon fodder too.
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