robertguttman while admittedly far from the best Hollywood effort of the period, it is interesting to note that "A Yank in the RAF" was produced and released well before the U.S. entered World War II. Although legally neutral, there was little doubt in which direction Hollywood's sympathy lay at that time, as well as that of the majority of the American people. President Franklin Roosevelt was doing all he legally could to enable supplies to reach Britain and France. Nevertheless, there did exist a highly vocal and politically influential movement to keep the nation out of the war, for whom the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh served conspicuously as spokesman. Those "Isolationists" were impelled not so much by a desire to preserve peace as they were by a desire to prevent the U.S. from aiding the European democracies against Nazi aggression, and they denounced films such as "A Yank in the RAF" as provocative propaganda. While most of the film is Hollywood fiction there are a few things in it that actually did occur. An example is the episode at the beginning of the movie about landing American-built planes on the US side of the Canadian border and then towing them across the border on their wheels. Absurd as that may seem it actually did happen, the screen writers did not make that up! In addition, while most of the movie was produced on the Hollywood sound stages it does include some footage filmed early in 1941 on RAF air bases in Britain, using real RAF aircraft and personnel. A typical Hollywood touch of the period is the depiction of RAF Lockheed Hudson bombers. In fact large numbers of Hudsons really were exported to Britain at that time, although the RAF actually employed them as maritime reconnaissance aircraft, not for bombing missions. However, since the planes were manufactured at the Lockheed plant located near Hollywood, Hudsons were readily available for use as movie props, so they frequently appeared in Hollywood movies to depict RAF bombers.

ejewett1 On the one hand we have Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, and they make a great couple.On the other hand we have the typical 1940s disregard for anything remotely resembling accuracy about airplanes and the military. As an example, an early scene involves a leaflet drop over Berlin from Lockheed Hudson coastal patrol bombers, which sported four (or five) .30 cal machine guns - two fixed firing forward, two in a dorsal turret, and (MK II on) one firing down and aft.The Luftwaffe would have had the airliner-derived patrol bombers for lunch, as they were pretty much defenseless from below except from behind.

Robert J. Maxwell I don't know why, but I always find myself enjoying this. It sounds like a typical war movie but it's mainly the story of a love triangle involving the cocky young pilot Tyrone Power, the sober but smitten Squadron Leader John Sutton, and the scrumptious Betty Grable. There are a few action scenes, well done for the period, but they provide background material. The focus is on the on-again off-again relationship between Power and Grable.One of the reasons it's so likable is that there are no villains except the Germans. Reginald Gardiner provides some comic relief as a pilot who is dying to meet chorine Grable but whose attempts to do so are always frustrated. Gardiner's self sacrifice is one of a few events that bring Tyrone Power to his senses and cause him to take both the war and his responsibilities to others seriously.Power himself was rarely more handsome or dashing. Over at Warners', Erroll Flynn was handling similar parts. Betty Grable has never looked better, more Midwestern, more cream fed, more succulent, more lustrously blond, more plump lipped and nubile. She was THE pin up girl of World War II. In her most famous photograph, she wears a modest one-piece white bathing suit, hands on hips, back to the camera, smiling at the camera over her right shoulder. Today the photo is an historical curiosity, but in its day the censors felt compelled to airbrush even the hint of her gluteal sulcus into nonexistence. Her legs were insured for a million dollars, according to legend, and those were days when a million dollars was still a lot of moolah.I always feel a little sorry for John Sutton, Powers' boss. He's respectful, polite, manly, brave -- and he loses the girl he loves because Tyrone Power was a bigger Hollywood star. Used to happen to me in high school all the time. I was a better kid than the coarse and vulgar captain of the football team, and I still can't understand why Evelyn Ritzko was more interested in him. However, Sutton, good man that he is, takes his ultimate rejection in stride.God, those Spitfires were beautiful airplanes, with their broad elliptical wings, and they were a pleasure to fly. Pilots used to other fighters complained that you couldn't GET them to drop their noses and dive. They simply floated along like a child's paper airplane.

sol **SPOILERS** Being released some two months before the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor "A Yank in the R.A.F" is hampered by having the movie take sides with a combatant, the UK, at war with a neutral, at that time , country Hitler's Germany. Obviously made to drum up support for a US entrance into the war against Germany & Italy which was barley 10% in many US public opinion polls taken at that time among the American people. It was the air force and navy of the Japanese Imperial Empire by it's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that did more to turn US public opinion around to an entrance into the war then all the pro-war films coming out of Hollywood from 1939-41 combined.The film itself is anything but a war, pro or con, movie with young wise-cracking American mail pilot Tim Baker, Tyrone Power, ending up in the UK just weeks after it together with it's far flung empire declared war against Germany. Tim seems to have absolutely no idea of what's going on between the allies, Britian & France, and the Germans and is only in London to rekindle his love affair with pretty and leggy all-American girl Carol Brown, Betty Grable, who somehow got herself a job as a chorus girl at London's Regency Club.Tim it seems joins up with the R.A.F only to impress Carol and nothing else his feeling for or against Nazi Germany are left only to the viewers imagination. The only time Tim showed any antipathy against the Germans was after he lost a number of friends, fellow R.A.F fliers, in the war which is very understandable but had nothing at all to do with what Hitler's Germany stood for or did. Tim would have felt and acted the same way if he had joined the German Luftwaffe, if his girlfriend Carol decided to live in Germany instead of the UK, and lost a number of his German pilot buddies to the R.A.F.The movie drags along for almost an hour until we finally get to see what's happening on the front lines with Tim and his fellow pilots shot down and landing in neutral Holland only to find out that it's been invaded by the German Army. Hiding in a windmill Tim together with Group Cmdr. John Morley, John Sutton, and Cpl. Baker, Donald Stuart, are confronted by this German officer Frederick Glermann who unknown to the three English-speaking pilots knows and speaks English. Acting like a real jerk as you could already see here, even before the US entrance into WWII, that with soldiers like Glermann in it's ranks Germany didn't stand a chance. Glermann instead of just waiting for the German troops coming to relieve him of the three R.A.F guys blows his cover by talking English to them showing Tim & Co. that he's on to them it's then that the three RAF men overpower and kill Glermann. All that Glermann had to do was to just keep his big mouth shut instead of trying to show the downed airmen what a great linguist he is and just let the German Army come to his rescue.The movie also has a love triangle in it between Tim and his R.A.F commander John Morley vying for the hand of the drop dead gorgeous Carol Brown, incidentally this was the only movie where Tyrone Power and Betty Grable were in together.It seems like Tim was winning over Carol who then later found out that he was cheating on her by playing abound with one of the nurses who was looking after him. This new romance on Tims part happened after he was rescued, together with thousands of British servicemen, during the retreat from the French port city of Dunkirk.The really best part of "A Yank in the R.A.F" comes in the last few minutes of the film with the battle and evacuation of Dunkirk. Thats where Tim finally shows what he's made of by, after being hospitalized for exposer, going back into action over the skies of German occupied France with his Spitfire taking the war back to the advancing Germans and shooting down a number of Luftwaffe Me-109 fighter planes. Tim ends up getting shot down himself and is missing in action until the movies final, and very unsurprising, ending sequence.