The Tuskegee Airmen (1995)

(On Cable TV, February 2021) It’s interesting to go spelunking into movie archives and unearth films that should be better known. At times, others do it for you—which explains why The Tuskegee Airmen gets a TCM airing in the middle of Black History Month as a reminder not only of the WW2 all-black fighter squadron, but also of the film’s existence—I could have named George Lucas’ 2013 film Red Tails as a Tuskegee film, but this first one dates from 1995 and seems to have slipped through the cracks of movie memory. To be fair, these are a few practical reasons for this — produced by HBO at a pre-digital time when TV movie budgets were synonymous with low production values and cut corners, The Tuskegee Airmen does amazing things with meager means (most notably by reusing historical footage and snippets from other WW2 movies, or cutting away when there’s a crash) and never got the kind of wide-scale theatrical or home video release that would have enshrined it as a reference. But that obscurity means an opportunity for rediscovery, especially given how it features Laurence Fishburne, then-recent Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. and John Lithgow in a supporting role as a senator. The script itself is decent without being overly remarkable, taking us through training and deployment to the European front, constantly reminding us of the opposition and outright racism that the airmen experienced throughout the war. The historical details are reportedly more faithful than you’d expect from a Hollywood production, which does help a film that sets out to remind us of a remarkable historical fact. The Tuskegee Airmen is not an ideal film, but neither was Red Tails, so the definitive Tuskegee film remains to be put together. In the meantime, have yourself a double-bill if you can find the film — and you’ll find that Cuba Gooding Jr. stars in both!