Pretty Good

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

It's a pretty brutal picture of the pilots of the P-47s that flew out of Corsica on ground attack missions to the Italian mainland. There are reasons why it shouldn't have been shown at home. American boys injured, crashing and dying; barns and auxiliary buildings blown up just in case they might be harboring something inimical to our interests. I don't know if it would have been stifled or not. John Huston had all sorts of problems with his "Battle of San Pietro" because it showed American dead being folded into mattress covers.That it WAS, in fact, made during the war is reflected in the sometimes bitter commentary, suggesting that the Italians and Germans deserved everything they got. There are some "good Germans" on Corsica, followed by a shot of a dilapidated graveyard.It's all color footage. We follow the young men around as they get out of bed and prepare themselves for another mission. The narration, by Lloyd Bridges, explains what's going on in a clipped, hypermasculine way. "Time for the briefing. Don't know what mission it is. Don't always care." The maps and associated graphics are simple enough for a child to understand.The missions involved bombing, rocket launching, and strafing, and the P-47 appears to have been built for it. It was a huge, powerful, fast single-engine, single-seat fighter that could carry an enormous load of ordinance and could take a punishing amount of damage. It carried eight .50 caliber machine guns, and we see a good deal of strafing from the gun cameras. A line of spurts tracks a target and envelopes it in dust. A shot, not shown here, that I've seen only once, has a hapless French farmer on a cart galloping his horse down a country road. Cart, farmer, and horse disappear in the cloud. And what carries much of the impact is not the farmer being killed, because we've seen humans shot and killed so often we've been desensitized. It's the horse, the poor innocent horse.There is another documentary about a pilot, Quentin Annenson, who flew P-47s in the European theater. Annenson narrates the film himself in his quiet Minnesota accent. It's longer, more personal, more detailed, and utterly gripping.

This film is introduced by Jimmy Stewart and part of the narration is provided by Lloyd Bridges. It shows the duties of a fighter group-- P-47 pilots whose job it is to blow the crap out of railroads, roads and targets of opportunity in order to choke off supplies to German troops in Southern Italy."Thunderbolt" was made in 1944 or 1945 (the film says 1944 and IMDb says '45) but it wasn't released until 1947. You can actually tell it wasn't released during the war because some aspects of this documentary probably wouldn't have done a lot to stir up the folks at home with patriotic zeal. This is because the documentary shows a few things that might have discouraged the audiences--such as one of the American planes crashing and killing the pilot. Also, there were quite a few VERY grisly corpses--things that I doubt that they would have wanted to show civilians. For the most part, films shown to the public were pretty sanitized...and this one wasn't. Now this is NOT a complaint- -in fact it makes this a much better and more realistic film. My only complaint about the film is the terrible quality of all the color footage. It's very degraded and muddy and could use conservation.

The setting is the Italian Campaign in World War Two. More specifically this is about a series of planned air strikes carried out using the P-47 Thunderbolt bombers launched from Corsica in 1944 that went under the codename Operation Strangle. The idea was to destroy the bridges, train tracks and vehicles on the roads at the narrowest section of the Italian peninsula, which in effect would cut off supplies to the German army located in the South of that country, allowing the Allies to advance big distances north.Like other wartime documentaries such as Attack in the Pacific (1944) this film shares similar strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it's obviously very raw, one-sided and propagandist to an extent. But on the other hand, it has a lot of fascinating real footage. This included planes fitted out with multi-camera set ups involved in the missions. We witness attacks on various targets which show pretty clearly the dangers involved. This also includes some indiscriminate bombings, where farmhouses seem to have been routinely blown up in case they were holding explosives, etc. We also see footage of the real men involved which adds an extra poignancy. You will get a more detailed overview of events in a documentary made nowadays but there is still some invaluable footage here. And it was a very important campaign to the overall war effort, so it's good to see it being documented for that reason alone.

Often times film making from the war slips into propaganda and flag waving. This film instead shows the cold hard truth of a fighter group working out of Corsica in 1944. The personal, humanized glimpses of real men instead of lantern jawed actors as they go on about their days, living their daily lives worrying about who won't come back. The shooting style is from on board cameras from several points on the planes and shows so many real mission realities from a normal fighter sweep over Italy including coldly shooting up innocent farmhouses in search of one that's not so innocent and plowing any thing that moves in the daylight.At some point as you watch this you go through so many emotions from the shock of realizing just how young these pilots are to being mystified about how they can be so cold as they light up the Italian country side to a sad understanding as director William Wyler shows you what would never be shown in a Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" movies, the charred body of a Jug pilot being pulled from the burning wreckage of his fighter with a hook. The end scene of the pilots and crews falling over drunk makes complete sense.This film is much more poignant than Wyler's later film "Memphis Belle" which while good shows the touch of war time censors. Released in 1945, after the war in Europe was over, "Thunderbolt" drives home the very humancosts of war.