Accomplishes it's purposes of providing more Technicolor exposure of Fox's ravishing young starlet: Gene Tierney, while providing a drama relating to the then current training of pilots, primarily for the Army Air Corps. Gene , at 22, looks especially beautiful in this film, as in the later Technicolor "Leave Her to Heaven". In the beginning, she's the girl of instructor Steve Britt(Preston Foster), but later becomes enamored of British trainee Peter Stackhouse(John Sutton), who is almost dismissed from the school, save for the intervention of Britt. Britt seems not too upset that Jean went for the younger man, as he was 20 years her senior......I was curious why the bright yellow and blue Stearman Model 75 biplanes were used as trainers, whereas the pilots were going to fly monoplanes in battle. Reportedly, these planes had a reputation for being easy for beginners to fly, relatively forgiving, and rugged. The pilots flying the combat planes in the fadeout were termed Thunder Birds. Interestingly, these fighters looked to me like probable P-47s, nicknamed Thunderbolts. ......
Brit John Sutton was a real life adventure seeker, born in India. He was most often cast as 'the other man' or villain, but here he's the winner, as he was in the prior film "Hudson's Bay" , again, with Gene as his ladylove.....The director, William Wellman, bargained with Darryl Zanuck to direct this film if he were allowed to direct the very controversial project "The Ox Bow Incident". As anticipated, the latter film was a box-office flop, but is highly regarded today. See the present film at YouTube
