Review of The Big Lift

This is a fine, often superbly written, acted, and photographed film marred by being 2 films in one. The film should have focused mainly on the romances between the two leading actors, Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas, with the airlift scenes mainly as a backdrop. Instead too much time is spent on tedious airline control sequences, the kind of scenes that are interesting with a great score, such as in Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis, but here they seem pointless, since there is content without form, or an attempt to impose form on the content. I think also of Victor Young's great flight scores.

But the romances in Berlin are superbly written with great comic relief, and even a sugar-coated history lesson the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both leading characters are superbly delineated and there is one powerful moment when the Douglas character obtains revenge on a German camp guard that brutalized him during the war.

This film could have been a classic if the director focused on one film instead of two. It had everything, as I said: humor romance and romantic entanglements, character development (both main characters are chastened by the end of the film) and a serious turn as the romance of one of the parties devolves into betrayal. I'm always impressed by films that refuse conventional romantic endings, and this is one of them.