MEMPHIS BELLE

Details

• Release Year: 1944
• Genre: Documentary, War
• Plot: Filmed in color, The 'Memphis Belle' has long been held up as a 'model' wartime documentary. In a tense, exciting 43 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 Fotresses is underline, but never overemphasized, by brief glimpses of thoses 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 The Memphis Belle is even more obvious when compared to the hokey fictionalized 1990 movie version of the Belle's 25th mission.
• Cast: Robert Morgan, Vince Evans, Jacob L. Devers, Ira C. Eaker, Captain Vincent B. Evans, Haywood Hansell, Technical Sergeant Robert J. Hanson, Eugene Kern, King George VI, Captain Charles B. Leighton, Technical Sergeant Harold P. Loch, Staff Sergeant Casimer A. Nastal, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Staff Sergeant John P. Quinlan, Staff Sergeant Cecil H. Scott, Captain James A. Verinis, Staff Sergeant Clarence E. Winchell, Stanley Wray, Arthur Kennedy, William Wyler
• Director: William Wyler
• Runtime: 0:43
• Company: First Motion Picture Unit, United States Army Air Forces, U.S. Army Air Corps, Echo Bridge Entertainment
• Media Format: movie