God is My co-Pilot (WB, 1945)

Flight Journal, Aug 2002 by Farmer, James H

God is My Co-Pilot (WB, 1945) Available from Belle and Blade Video, (800) 3652104; customer service (973) 328-8488;

www.belleandblade.com. VHS; $19.98.

I have waited a long time for this one! At long last, and thanks in no small part to Belle and Blade Video president Steve Mormando, the Robert Scott biopic "God is My Co-Pilot" has made it to commercial video, and the black-andwhite image is simply gorgeous! More than a score of USAAF

Training Command P-40Fs, some one dozen B-25Gs and countless "Hollywood Zeros"-the ubiquitous AT-6-fill the screen's flight ramp at Luke Auxiliary One and the Arizona skies with a fleet of WW II-era aircraft! Unfortunately, the production's crowded skies cost the life of one military flier in an inadvertent midair. A sharp-eyed viewer will also catch in the film's opening sequence at the AVG Kunming airfield set (actually the Warner Brothers' Ranch near Los Angeles) a trio of the full-scale P-40 mock-ups built several years earlier for the 1942 Republic classic, "Flying Tigers."

An unusually large number

of real-life Flying Tiger personalities are portrayed in the film. They include Gen. Claire Chennault (Raymond Massey), Tex Hill (john Ridgely), Ed Rector (Craig Stevens), Johnny Petach (Dane Clark) and visiting USAAF flier Bob Scott (Dennis Morgan), on whose autobiography the film is based.

The screenwriters also included a number of fictional characters, the most outrageous and funniest being actor Richard Loo's Japanese ace, "Tokyo Joe." The inter-plane chatter is as funny today as when first screened more than half a century ago! "OK, you Yankee Doodle Dandies," radios Joe to his American opponents, "Where are you gangsters? Come up and get a load of that scrap metal you sold us!" And, as often as not, one or two of his formation's "Zero fighters" are soon downed. Loo's character subsequently utters the Japanese epithet, "Buck-atari," which my Japanese/American friends tell me politely translates into "dumbbell." Enjoy!