The Dawn Patrol

The Dawn Patrol is a 1938 American war film, a remake of the pre-Code 1930 film of the same name. Both were based on the short story "The Flight Commander" by John Monk Saunders, an American writer said to have been haunted by his inability to get into combat as a flyer with the U.S. Air Service. The film, directed by Edmund Goulding, stars Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Niven as Royal Flying Corps fighter pilots in World War I. Of the several films that Flynn and Rathbone appeared in together, it is the only one in which their characters are on the same side. Although sparring, as in their other roles, their characters are fast friends and comrades in danger. The Dawn Patrol'''s story romanticizes many aspects of the World War I aviation experience that have since become clichés: white scarves, hard-drinking fatalism by doomed pilots, chivalry in the air between combatants, the short life expectancy of new pilots, and the legend of the "Red Baron". However, The Dawn Patrol also has a deeper and more timeless theme in the severe emotional scars suffered by military commander who must constantly order men to their deaths (not a single woman appears in the film). This theme underlies every scene in The Dawn Patrol. Plot In 1915, at the airfield in France of 59 Squadron Royal Flying Corps, Major Brand (Basil Rathbone), the squadron leader and his adjutant Phipps (Donald Crisp) anxiously await the return of the dawn patrol. Brand is near his breaking point. He has lost 16 pilots in the previous two weeks, nearly all of them young replacements with little training and no combat experience. Brand is ordered to send up tomorrow what amounts to a suicide mission. Captain Courtney (Errol Flynn), leader of A Flight, and his good friend "Scotty" Scott (David Niven) return but two of the replacements are not so lucky and another, Hollister, is severely depressed by having witnessed the death of his best friend. The survivors repair to the bar in their mess for drinks and fatalistic revelry. Courtney does his best to console Hollister but the youngster breaks down in grief.