Jan. 25, 2012 - Issue #849: Blind Date
Red Tails
Take the hot air of a bad PBS documentary about racial segregation in the US Army, add the cold look of F/X re-creations of Second World War skyfights from a mediocre History Channel special, and there's Red Tails. In the opening, a confusing battle involving pilots never seen again—save the one sneering Nazi baddie (redundancy alert!)—and leaden, state-the-obvious exposition ground the flick as it's trying to take off.The 332nd Fighter Group—comprising many of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen—are reduced to war-movie stereotypes, propelled by swelling music and firing off character clichés ("Ray was the best soldier I ever met"), historical lectures, or go-get-'em speeches with anachronisms ("Man up"). One escapes from a POW camp in record time (two scenes); the actual 66 men killed-in-action are misrepresented here by just one man dead (the only one likely to cut the heartstrings of our parachuting emotions).
Racism in the US Army's defeated by the men's unquestioning commitment to national honour, while in rural-idyll Italy (ever-so recently ruled by fascists, veramente), no one blinks at a black American dating a local white woman. And to think, meanwhile, back on the homefront in Tuskegee, local black men were being inoculated with syphilis as part of a government experiment, while told only they were being treated for "bad blood." Huh. But turning over any awful historical complexities and contradictions in your head isn't part of Red Tails. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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