POWER DIVE

US, 1941, 69 minutes, Black-and-white.
Richard Arlen, Jean Parker, Helen Mack, Roger Pryor, Don Castle, Cliff Edwards, Thomas Ross, Louis Jean Heydt.
Directed by James Hogan.

During the 1930s there were many aviation films especially with the interest of Howard Hughes. Cinematographers and editors became more adept at filming aerial combat and demonstration flights.

This brief film is in that vein. It is a story of inventors, one being killed in a crash and his wife grieving. Another, blind, working with plastics and experimenting. There are also two brothers, one a crash pilot, the other an inventor, the rivalry – especially with the daughter of the blind inventor, Jean Parker. Richard Arlen is the pilot. He and Jean Parker appeared that year in another aviation film, Flying Blind.

So, while there are the dramatics, there are also the aerial sequences, the risks that pilots took, going high in the air, trying to manage the craft in the gears, the peeling away of plastic, loss of consciousness, the crash dives.

There is what now seems rather lame comedy from one of the workers at the airport, Cliff Edwards.

This was the atmosphere of 1941, the film released in the months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The film is mainly of interest to those who like to know about the development of planes and aviation in the early 20th century.