Rocky and Nancy, couple in love, when War is declared (WWI, in spite of their early 30s clothing). Rocky (played by Richard Dix) compares soldiers to lemmings "trying to reach a goal that doesn't exist" - Nancy (Elizabeth Allan) thinks her man is "yellow" as she pushes him into going to battle. Next thing you know, Rocky has joined an Aero Squadron and is encamped in a barracks full of nicknamed comrades and a menagerie of "mascots" not limited to a goat, pig, chimp, parrot, and Rocky's personal mascot, a cute little lion cub (actually, he looked sort of like a leopard to me). Rocky starts out fighting his morals against shooting another man - but not for long, it seems, as Rocky gets pretty darn aggressive amazingly quickly - the war has completely gone to his head as Rocky turns into the fighting ace of all aces!This film is a bit hit or miss - parts of it are good, other parts are quite slow-moving and boring. Richard Dix gives a somewhat hammy performance and there are some pretty fake looking kisses between the two leads, a real lack of chemistry there, I would say. BUT - there is some interesting photography in the air battle scenes, and a few other interesting scenes here and there, especially notable is a scene where Dix is confronted by one of the German soldiers he shot down, now on his death bed. Okay film.

Check this one out. This is a film that uses the truncated running times of the early 30's to its advantage. While it's a rule of thumb in film-making to slowly develop characters, Ace of Aces, perhaps because it's a programmer and simply doesn't have the time, skips the usual intermediate stages -- you know, like introspection. Characters here go from pacifism to bloodthirsty insanity in the time it takes to cut from one scene to the next.Richard Dix is a sculptor who is accosted in his studio one day by "girlfriend" Elizabeth Allen, who, in the space of about three seconds, threatens to break up with him if he doesn't give up his fancies about art and get his head blown off in WWI ( and there is the tantalizing suggestion that she is sexually unsatisfied with him and is using the war as an opportunity to slake her lust. ) Three more seconds go by, and suddenly Dix has metamorphosed into the Red Baron, gunning down his hapless victims from his elevated perch in the sky. Meanwhile we get lots of superimposed heraldic animal heads, dragons, lions, falcons and such layered on top of the soldiers in their bunker, leering, grimacing beasts of war that give the film a haunting medieval flavor. When the soldiers talk to each other, the tone is unlike any other war film -- we aren't meant to reflect poignantly on their impending deaths or get to know them as individuals so that we're caught up in their fates. Instead their conversation is fairly eloquent-sounding ( a lot of these guys are swanky Brits ) yet subtly drained of meaning so that we hear their witty, boastful words almost as the squawks, barks and roars of barnyard animals. Not one character is sympathetic.This is a film whose transitions are so abrupt that the end result comes close to something like Kleist's play The Prince of Homburg, a jagged, neurotic ride through an insanely arbitrary world. Collective behavior, individual psychology, love relationships, religious impulses all seem to waver and bend like phantom images in the sun. When Dix and Allen get together at the end and fall in each other's arms again, you feel sick.

I never liked Richard Dix very much. He's just awful in the wonderful film, Cimarron, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Any other film I've seen in him seems to show him off as a hammy, middle-aged actor just going through the paces. But Ace of Aces was a slight surprise. This WW I story about a pacifist artist who joins up and become a bloodthirsty killer under the guise of being a flying "ace" seems like the kind of role he needed. In a way it's similar to the role of Yancy in Cimarron, but minus the "Wahoos" he lets out sporadically in that film. Plus in Cimarron Dix pales in comparison to the great performance turned in by Irene Dunne. In Ace of Aces, Dix is the star. No one else registers very strongly. Elizabeth Allan is the girl friend, Ralph Bellamy the commanding officer, Theodore Newton the best friend, Nella Walker the socialite, and the Stroud twins (Claude and Clarence) play fellow flyers. Not a great film by any means, but a solid story certainly helps. The aerial dogfights are good but not as good as in Hell's Angels. Check it out.

...because there is never a defining moment where protagonist "Rocky" goes from pacifism to being a war monger. What pushed him to join the US Air Corps in the first place? Dix character strikes me as psychotic; he kills without mercy, then is utterly ruined as a combat pilot after seeing one dying German Faehnrich (officer cadet.) Nearly twenty guys in his squadron die in the air, men he was comrade with. Bad writing attempts to be Hemingway-esque, comes off sounding like War Department training film diologue. Only plus: our hero flys a real French Nieuport biplane fighter, and the enemy seems to be using real German Fokker fighters. A good rainy day WWI film.