When the United States entered into World War II, men like Jimmy Stewart enlisted and served with distinction while men like John Wayne stayed safely at home and pretended to be war heroes by making a bunch of movies about the war. Ahh, but whatever. We're not going to hold it against ol' Marion, because movies like The Flying Tigers are pretty enjoyable, and people probably didn't want to deal with John Wayne on the battlefield anyway.

The Flying Tigers of history were a group od American "volunteers" -- some would say mercenaries -- who flew missions in China against the invading Japanese army. John Wayne's version of the story sticks pretty close to that, then throws in the usual elements you expect from these movies -- a love triangle, a guy who dies tragically, a guy with a pencil-thin moustache who has disgraced himself and must be redeemed during the final mission, and at least one scene where The Duke has to dole out some tough love in that classic acting style of his. You're not going to learn a whole lot about the resistance movement in China during World War II, but you get to see John Wayne punch people and blow stuff up, so that makes up for the lack of background info on the real Flying Tigers (which wouldn't have been background info at the time -- it would have been current info).

All in all, it's a pretty good flag-waver of a film and an excellent way for me to have ended this Memorial Day Weekend (to actually keep in the spirit of things, I visited Grant's Tomb), with real dogfight footage mixed in when they needed to have some action. A lot can be made in retrospect of its propaganda style approach to storytelling, but considering the scope of the war, that's really nothing about which one should get bent out of shape. The Japanese in this movie are non-characters, nothing more than heads and shoulders in a cockpit shooting down or getting down by the Tigers. The Chinese characters are mostly relegated to the role of little kids and nurses, since after all, this is the story of gung-ho American fighter pilots strutting around slapping each other on the shoulder. And to that I say, hell yeah!

Some of the action is surprisingly bloody, albeit in black and white. Wayne's World War II movies made during World War II were certainly a lot better than his Vietnam movies made during the Vietnam War, where the Vietnam War looked exactly like World War II. The Flying Tigers is also unique in that it is one of the few WWII films that doesn't feature a guy from Brooklyn who is called Brooklyn, and also in that it is one of the only aviator-themed war movies not to feature a chewing gum-popping mechanic named Corky.