Filmed in color,
The Memphis Belle
has long been held up as a "model" wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 41 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride in the fact that the Belle has completed 25 successful missions, there's no phony heroism, no grandstanding, no flagwaving. As calm-voiced narrator Ed Kern explains, the Belle has a job to do, and it does it, and that's all. The danger facing these Flying Fortresses is underlined, but never overemphasized, by brief glimpses of those doomed ships that didn't make it back.
Memphis Belle
was directed by William Wyler, who also flew several missions with the crew, manning the camera himself at considerable risk. The overall excellence of
is even more obvious when compared to the hokey fictionalized 1990 movie version of the Belle's 25th mission.