Wonderful character development!

Let's be realistic.

An action-packed slog

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Friends since their WWII days as part of the Flying Tigers, Meeker's character is now a Lt. (I think) on the Salt Lake City police force while Janssen, whose character misses the good old days and feels somewhat disconnected with things as they are in the present day of 1973, is a radio station helicopter traffic announcer. During the course of his work one day, he spots a bank robbery in progress and, seeing the thieves take a young lady hostage and being aware that they will likely escape if he doesn't intervene, decides to follow them in his copter. Before long, he becomes much more involved with this scenario than he imagined he would be. The interchanges between Janssen and Meeker during the pursuit, as well as the final encounter between the forces of law & order and the criminals, are indeed memorable and worth a look.

I've seen "Birds of Prey" only once, decades ago, but I remember it as great fun. It's also a piece of cultural history. It first aired on TV in January 1973, as the U.S. war in Vietnam was officially rushing to an end, and it's a cops-and-robbers adventure about helicopters, the chariots of choice of that conflict.The setting is a big city in the American West. The villains are robbers -- Vietnam vets, perhaps? -- who make their getaway by chopper. The squabbling heroes are two middle-aged men who served together in World War II. One of them (played by Ralph Meeker) is now a successful bureaucrat, serving as the city's police chief. The other (played by David Janssen) is somewhere between a free spirit and a ne'er-do-well, a man who flies a traffic helicopter to earn a living but has never left behind the memories of the air war of his youth. When the robbers take to the skies, the battle of the generations is on.They didn't call such men such as Meeker's and Janssen's characters "the greatest generation" in 1973. They called them "the establishment." This movie is nostalgia for the simplicities of World War II before such nostalgia was fashionable.If the DVD version does indeed feature modern rock instead of the original movie's 1940s sound track, it's a shame. But maybe it's inevitable. Now that the World War II veterans have grown old and the Vietnam veterans have taken their place in the middle-aged zone, few viewers would recognize the great big band standards. Alas, time flies. Like a bird.

I was very happy to see that this movie was finally available on DVD and ordered it from Amazon. It arrived today and I was greatly disappointed to find that the soundtrack of WWII era music had been trashed and replaced with music that wouldn't even be accepted by Muzak! What's missing? The opening and closing credits were over "I'll Get By", and Walker's (Janssen) requested song is "Three Little Fishies". In several scenes, Janssen can be seen singing along.This movie is a great action film, but crappy soundtrack really detracts from the story.

David Jansen plays the phenominal role of ex-World War II fighter pilot who is a traffic heliocopter pilot. After seeing robbers flee a crime in a heliocopter he follows, refuels along the road, frees the hostage and enters into a showdown with the robbers.The film has many scenes of sensational flying.