THE COLD BLUE (2018)

  . . . plus THE MEMPHIS BELLE: A STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS (1944)

Left to rot in the National Archives or circulating in steadily deteriorating prints, the U.S. military has been a disinterested keeper of the historically important documentaries they made during World War II; Public Domain orphans by design.  So it was something of a fluke when all 15 hours of wartime footage shot for one of the best examples of these films, William Wyler’s Oscar-winning 45-minute THE MEMPHIS BELLE, turned up safe, sound & in generally good condition in the archive vaults.  Digitally restored & reedited as the basis of a new documentary by Erik Nelson, done in a flashback construction with remembrances by some of the few surviving 8th Air Force crew members (none from The Memphis Belle), the results are often physically stunning and the reconfigured ‘teaching’ angle touching & effective.  But not a patch on Wyler’s original, far more dramatic, story-oriented cut of the culminating 25th mission of the Memphis Belle & crew on a last bombing run over Germany and then back to their British base before going home to the States.  Wyler, and his three cameramen (one died when his plane was shot down, one was William Clothier who would shoot John Ford’s late Westerns), all going up on active flights with 5-minute spools of 16mm Technicolor stock for their wind-up cameras.  An ‘extra’ on the Kino Lorber DVD of COLD BLUE, it’s really the Main Event and almost certainly never looked better.  Wyler’s daughter Catherine (an exec producer here) thinks it never looked as good.

DOUBLE-BILL:  In FIVE CAME BACK/’17, John Huston, John Ford, Frank Capra, George Stevens and William Wyler get a well-deserved mini-series to tell the story of their war time films & service.  OR: The 1990 film MEMPHIS BELLE, a pretty good film with a lousy rep.