Air battles related movies  

I watched Stealth last night. Lots of aerial action. While it's a below average movie, the sound and visuals are pretty tasty. The sound in the opening scene is very nice. Lots of explosions, SAM launches and flybys, etc.

Get a copy of The Dam Busters. Great movie, and the air attack sequences just might remind you of something :)

Flight of the Intruder. About Viet Nam even if it is about an attack squadron instead of fighters.

The Tuskeegee Airmen comes to mind as one not on that list.

Howard Hughes directed a movie called Hells Angels, filmed in the 1920's, that contains some reasonably good aviation footage.

I can't imagine that any studio today could afford the insurance to film dogfights like those.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri (Mickey Rooney, Grace Kelly, William Holden) Korean war.

larry

Two of the greatest air comabt movies are about The Great War: The Dawn Patrol and The Blue Max.

The Flying Leathernecks is pretty good too, about Marine flyers at Guadalcanal.

And don't forget Air Force by Howard Hawks.

In the late 60s AIP made a picture about von Richtofen, the German flyer from The Great War. But I forget the exact name. Seems to me that John Philip Law played the German flyer.

The Flying Tigers, nice John Wayne movie.

Battle of Britain

Actors: Harry Andrews, Michael Caine, Trevor Howard, Curd Jürgens, Ian McShane

Great WWII dogfight sequences.

LOL! Good one...
I have both & I was thinkin' the same thing ;) when I saw it.

On "Stealth"... I found it a quite entertaining mix of the "Top Gun" genre & Sci-Fi.
And then, as has been mentioned elsewhere, there's Ms. Biel ;)

Another Good'n "662 Squadron".

Dark Blue World. Czech pilots in the RAF. Terrific WWII air battle footage.

Sanjay

Thirty Seconds over Tokyo -- Doolittle Raid, Jimmy Stweart as Doolittle.

SAC (Strategic Air Command) -- less flying and more drama, but a good movie about Air Force politics at the end of the LeMay era. Stewart again.

FireFox -- Good yarn about a MiG prototype that's sooooo good, we decide to steal it right from the hangar. Shot in late-Cold-War Soviet Union, has a particularly dirty, grimy, gritty feel to it. Clint Eastwood stars as the pilot-thief, haunted by memories of Vietnam action. Fairly nice missle fights, and even a gunfight or two. (I don't consider missle fights to be a dogfight.. for a dogfight, you need to see the rivets on the other guy's plane ;) )

Final Countdown -- has a unique dogfight in it. Tomcats on Zeros (yes, that's right...) This is what happens when you take a modern carrier air group and drop just outside Pearl, on December 6, 1941. Good movie which will fascinate time-travel aficionados.

Star Wars (IV) -- Just about all the figher action is derived from Battle of Britain, The Dam Busters, and other classic 40's - 50's military air movies.

When "Star Wars" was released I was quite taken that it was as though the WW II Pacific carrier war were transferred to outer space. Whereas Star Trek warfare is more like earlier naval warfare with the ships slugging it out directly with their big guns.

In WW II naval terms Star Wars is Midway or the Marianas Turkey Shoot and Star Trek is the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal or the battle of the Denmark Straights.

Dam Busters
"how many guns do you think"
"I'd say about 10 guns, some in the fields, some in the towers"

Star Wars IV
"how many guns do you think, gold 5"
"I'd say about 30 guns, some on the surface, some in the towers"
(even to the last breathe, and the tempo of how the guy speaks, the perfomance 'IS' the same)

Never seen that one. Thanks.

larry

Yeah, great one.! My favorite scene is at the begining when the 109's come screaming across the field at fence top height. Excellent! :D

I like near the beginning when a Hurricane does a roll and the carb starves and then loads up and then coughs-out.

How about "The Last Starfighter?"

How about Fire Birds? It was OK in a cheesy Top Gun ripoff kinda way...

OT - but cool -

Edil,

If you're really into dogfighting, you should check out the game Ace of Aces -

The Ace of Aces game system was a stroke of brilliance when it was first released by Gameshop Inc. in 1980. Designer Alfred Leonardi, a history teacher, crafted a totally new game mechanism which used illustrated "programmed" books to recreate aerial combat. For the first time, gamers could fight a dogfight using simultaneous movement without cumbersome log sheets, enormous rulebooks, and many hours of playing time. In fact, a game of Ace of Aces played by experienced players can move so quickly that it is virtually a "real time" simulation.

The original Ace of Aces "Handy Rotary Series" came with a pair of brown game books each slightly smaller than a paperback novel. Figure 1. Each book contained 223 illustrations depicting various views from the cockpit of the player's aircraft. The view on each page was oriented to show the location of the opponent's aircraft. For example, the "Allies" book showed a view of the opposing Fokker as seen from a Sopwith Camel cockpit. Conversely, the "Germans" book showed a view of the Camel as seen from the cockpit of a Fokker Dr. I triplane. Figure 2.

http://maverick.brainiac.com/aoa/aoa1.html

If you're into big naval warfare, Star Wars III has what has to be either Surigao Strait or even more appropiately, Trafalgar. We're talking dozens if not hundreds of capital ships alongside each other at pistol-shot, trading broadsides in very low orbit over Corsuscant.. and it's dawn :D

Most of that air footage is taken from 'Battle of Britain'.

The Red Baron

Warning- director was Roger Corman...

Right, as well as a bit of footage from 'Memphis Belle'. But they used digital remastering to blend that old footage with stuff shot specifically for this film. They also used CG to grab elements from old footage to combine with new backgrounds and foreground elements. The resulting footage looks fresh rather than old film simply edited in.

Sanjay

A couple I didn't see not all are necessarily volluminous are battling
633 Squadron
Flight of the Intruder
blue Max
Capt. Corelli's mandolin

And then 2 that I like a lot
Empire of the Sun and Har's War

both have P-51's with short aerial scenes and decent LFE.

Since no one has mentioned it yet, Pearl Harbor. It was a sappy film but the aerial sequences are great, and it has probably got the greatest ground attack scenes ever put to film, with fantastic surround sound.

For me, the movie that comes second to mind after Top Gun has always been The Right Stuff. It's not combat per se, but it's exciting aerial footage for sure.

I'll mention one more Howard Hughes film, Jet Pilot. A classic from the Cold War, with John Wayne playing his usual heroic American, and Janet Leigh as his gorgeous love interest and Russian spy/pilot. Watch for the Bell X-1 and other seldom-seen vintage hardware. The last flight of that historic plane was in this film, after which it was re-painted "Glamorous Glynnis" and donated to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum.

And for something different, The Great Waldo Pepper.

Gary

The Dam Busters. Yeah. Part of an absolutely superb (and somewhat pricey) boxed set from Anchor Bay of British War Films.

Hell's Angels absolutely; mentioned at length in Scorcese's The Aviator. Ditto Air Force. Another that should be seen from Howard Hawks is Only Angels Have Wings, with Cary Grant, Thomas Mitchell, Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth, which is about air mail pilots in a small Central/South American country. No dogfights, but believe me, you won't even care.

Wings is another famous WWI film, a silent. And there is a silent and sound version of The Dawn Patrol.

David Niven plays a doomed flier in what has to be one of the greatest opening scenes in movie history in A Matter of Life and Death. The rest of the movie is on the ground (and is fabulous), but see it for that opening scene. Eagerly anticpated for its R1 DVD release.

While it doesn't prominantly feature them, Independence Day does feature some "dog fight" sequences.

Holy @#$& ! I tried to find The Dam Busters for sale on different Websites, and the best I could find was $40 at Amazon. I hope it's worh it. Oh, by the way that's NOT for the british box set, just the single DVD. On the other hand: I did find The "DAME" Busters, but I'm pretty sure that's an entirely different movie. LOL