grantss Pee Wee Williams joins the US Army Air Corps and eventually gets selected to train as an air gunner. We see his training and then how he handles the real thing - aerial combat.Made in the middle of WW2, so you already know it's a propaganda film. Is reasonably interesting though, despite its marketing-orientation and military inaccuracies. Also has a folksy charm.Cast includes Burgess Meredith as Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as the pilot of his B-24.

Robert J. Maxwell Interesting and informative brief war-time documentary that takes through aerial gunnery school with a Kansas boy, Burgess Meredith, who learned how to shoot by downing crows that were eating his crops. Ronald Reagan is the captain who encourages him. Tom Neal is an instructor. Classmate Dane Clark is as close as the production should get to a stereotypical New York wise guy.It's not bad, for what it is. I believe there is a feature film floating around in the ether starring Chester Morris in "Aerial Gunner." It covers much of the same ground as this training camp film but is mucked up with an unnecessary romance and equally gratuitous conflict among the men.You know why it's interesting? Because every young boy wants to shoot a gun. They don't necessarily want to kill anyone. They just want to hit a target with a projectile. The dynamics of baseball are identical. The bat moves; the ball moves; and you try to hit one with the other. Golf likewise involves making a projectile (the golf ball) move to its target (the little hole in the ground with the flag sticking out of it). Bocce ball and darts ditto.There's no drama in the film. It's not like Randall Jarell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.""From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."This is a flag waver from beginning to end and the viewer has to put up with a bit of corn, but the film isn't long. And it does have an educational narrative.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . while the other was sentenced to eight years in the White House shooting gallery. That's the story of THE REAR GUNNER, where Burgess Meredith is blasting away at the Enemy, and Ronald Reagan is just his pilot, along for the ride. It is men like Meredith's R.E.L.A. "Peewee" Williams who are presented as the REAL war heroes, "the budding Galahads of Gunnery." Though some of these "Freedom Fighters" seem to be in it primarily to improve their odds of winning carnival midway shooting gallery Kewpie doll prizes (like PeeWee's classmate, "Benny"), most of these "flexible gunners" were too small to make their high school football teams, making them the perfect fit for the cramped quarters of the B-24 bomber gunnery positions. PeeWee wins a Distinguished Service Medal for his success in launching sneak attacks from the rear position. He's shown here bringing down several Japanese Zero fighter planes, thanks to his boyhood pursuit of gunning down "black killer" crows in Kansas. (The latter were decimating the duck population.) One might sum up by saying that PeeWee won one (or two, or three) for the Gipper.

shampoojones "A short film bout a B-17 gunner starring Burgess Meredith and Ronald Reagan. Approximately 20 minutes - B & W."I guess, back in 1943, you were supposed to join the armed forces after seeing this short film. It's pretty much a recruitment film. Meredith plays a stuttering soldier who finds his place as a rear gunner aboard a B-17. Ronald Reagan plays the part of the pilot.I found this film on a DVD of WWII films that I bought at Wal-Mart for about five dollars.It's a great film to make fun of with your friends. Just imagine all the lines from Rocky and Grumpy Old Men that you can quote while watching Meredith shoot down Japanese fighters over the Pacific.