This is something of a curio and a title that has certainly eluded me until now. 'Spig' Wead garnered most of his flying experience in the first world war and beginning in 1929 he converted this experience into dozens of screenplays throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s and it's reasonable that his early success as a scriptwriter enabled him to research developments in aviation. In Dive Bomber he turned in a screenplay that was released in the very year that America entered the second world war yet there is scarcely a reference to something that was surely on everyone's mind. Instead Wead gives us what amounts to a quasi documentary on medical research into high altitude flying and although he does fly a little 'action man' Errol Flynn is cast as a naval lieutenant who is also a qualified doctor and spends more time in a laboratory than in the air. The lion's share of flying is done by Fred MacMurray, on loan from his home studio Paramount and the film is formulaic inasmuch as Flynn and MacMurray clash in the first reel and only come to respect each other and develop a tentative friendship around reel 10. Likewise romance gets short shrift and Alexis Smith (receiving her first screen credit following a string of uncredited appearances) could just as well have phoned it it. It also marked the final collaboration between Flynn and Mike Curtiz who had been at odds all through a long a fruitful collaboration. Strangely bland but worth a look as a curio.
Review of Dive Bomber
