Flying Leathernecks

John Wayne and Robert Ryan lead the cast of this solid, very human WWII drama. You might think that Nicholas Ray would be out of his element with a patriotic war movie, yet the man knows how to direct a movie, and he even makes perhaps the best use of stock footage in any war film of the era. Wayne is the tough nosed new commander of a Naval air squadron and Ryan is the more sensitive XO who the men respect. In some of the latter scenes, Wayne seems strangely out of place in Ray's boldly iconoclastic vision of Americana, yet the film as a whole works well and wisely focuses the drama on the two leads rather than on mindless propaganda or any superficial social statements.