A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941)

(On TV, September 2020) A very nice surprise opens A Yank in the R.A.F.: A recreation of a famous bit of US/Canadian history in which American-built planes were flown, driven and then pushed to the Canadian Border, at which point the Canadians pulled the planes onto British Allied territory and were able to legally fly the planes to the UK while breaking no neutrality law. Alas, the rest of the film is far less interesting: Featuring Tyrone Power as a far-too-cocky American pilot, the film takes us through the first two years of WW2 with Power’s character fighting the war as a sideshow to his insistent pursuit of another American working in London (played his frequent screen partner Betty Grable).  A Yank in the R.A.F. tries to do too many things at once while not quite changing gears fast enough to suit the project. Produced at breakneck speed as the Americans were still contemplating whether to get involved in the war, the project tried to take the Power/Grable dynamic and force it into a war movie, ending up making compromises on both sides. Grable’s character is also far too much of a cad to be likable—and the film’s insistence on his rule-breaking heroism rings false from the get-go, as he casually flies from the Manitoba/North Dakota border to Trenton, Ontario—a two-thousand-kilometre trip! Granted, this is probably the only film in history where confusing Trenton, ON with Trenton, PA becomes a minor plot point, but still—it sets the stage for even dumber stuff later on, perhaps reflecting the lack of polish of a production so closely following the events of the war. If nothing else, this pre-propaganda film was clearly meant to prepare the audience for the United States intervening in the war, and by proxy gets us thinking about the now-unbelievable and often-elided isolationist attitude of the United States during early WW2. Unfortunately, A Yank in the R.A.F. is not quite the vehicle fit to fully do justice to the topic—Much of what it does well has been done better in other movies.