Bookended by scenes of David Farrar in hospital with amnesia having just crashed his plane, the bulk of this film takes the form of an extended flashback depicting the rootless existence of four aviators and the two women in their lives (which gets a little crowded at times) with a fatalism reminiscent of Fitzgerald's lost generation and William Dieterle's 'The Last Flight' (1931).
The film meanders in stages as befits it's characters' unstructured lives and it's origins in a novel by John Llewellyn Rhys (killed in action while serving with the RAF in 1940). Most of the budget seems to have gone on the airfield sequences, and as in 'The Last Flight', one of the pilots, Jerry Frazer, regretfully recalls the purpose and excitement now gone that his life had had as a flyer in The Great War (hence the title). The two women (Judy Campbell & Sonia Dresdel) are drawn into these men's lives by their shared enthusiasm for aviation and are more than mere bystanders. In the end it's a new war that finally provides salvation in the form of official backing for Jerry's idea for developing freight-carrying gliders, and regular employment for Farrar.
The film meanders in stages as befits it's characters' unstructured lives and it's origins in a novel by John Llewellyn Rhys (killed in action while serving with the RAF in 1940). Most of the budget seems to have gone on the airfield sequences, and as in 'The Last Flight', one of the pilots, Jerry Frazer, regretfully recalls the purpose and excitement now gone that his life had had as a flyer in The Great War (hence the title). The two women (Judy Campbell & Sonia Dresdel) are drawn into these men's lives by their shared enthusiasm for aviation and are more than mere bystanders. In the end it's a new war that finally provides salvation in the form of official backing for Jerry's idea for developing freight-carrying gliders, and regular employment for Farrar.
