I loved "Red Tails," the George Lucas film about the famous African American pilots who Pentagon brass tried to keep from having a heroic role in defeating Nazi tyranny in the air war over Europe. But as spirit had it, as spirit so often does, the opportunity came and the airmen became heroes.
I knew very little about the Tuskegee airmen, as they are called, when I became the only black flying officer in the 70th Air Refueling Squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base in the early 1960s. American history is so rich that there should be something that any American can look back on proudly, and personally identify with.
In no high school or college course did I hear about Tuskegee airmen. There were rumors. But during the pre-Google days I spent in Officer Training School I found enough material on them to make me smile at whatever hardships I was encountering. If they could handle their business, I was surely going to handle mine.
There are few films that I do not drift away from for a few seconds because what I am seeing is uninteresting. From this film I never drifted once. The term riveted is overused, so what word can describe my reaction -glued. No, lost. I was lost in the film. It created a world so satisfying to me that I entered it and stayed.
Why? Because at last here was a film that did not depict black people as clowns or criminals, that did not attempt to make me feel in some way ashamed of the images of us, as most of us are not ashamed of the reality of us. It depicted the sense of the way black men are with each other better than any film I can remember.
I knew all of these guys --the righteous one, the dare devil one, the one seeking to be a man among men, the smooth one who let's things happen through him without getting in their way, and the one who rises to the level of statesman because that is required of him.
As I stated in another post about "The Help," The Huxtables, not "The Help," are in the White House:
"Not long ago one of the most powerful woman in the book publishing industry, ever, (white, now retired) confessed to me that inside 'the incredible whiteness of publishing' (her usage), there is no one who is going to champion a story about 'intelligent, educated, morally upstanding, self-loving, each-other-loving African Americans.'"
Inside the equally incredible whiteness of the film industry, one of the most successful filmmakers in history, George Lucas (white), said he was turned down by every major studio. So as Christian Blauvelt of Inside Movies reported:
"He (Lucas) self-financed Red Tails - the epic passion project about the Tuskegee Airmen he's been fighting to bring to the big screen for 23 years - with close to $100 million of his personal fortune. Today he's got to be smiling, though, because it looks like his investment has a shot at paying off."
I'm smiling too, remembering the movie images of intelligent (they spoke well), educated (they were all college material), morally upstanding (none of them peppered their speech with profanity, or their behavior with deceit). They were Americans with dark skins making their contribution to the nation.
I know guys like the character 'Easy' Julian. I know why they named him Easy. I know guys like 'Junior' Gannon. In fact, I've given them a hard time for being baby faced. I identified with Joe 'Lightning' Little because in my 47 missions over Vietnam, I never once felt that anything bad was going to happen to me.
I liked the characters' self-love and each-other love, and I understand why film critics like Michael Phillips of Tribune Newspapers had to come after the film with guns blazing.
"'Red Tails' squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliché. Some of the action's fun. But if something about that statement doesn't sound right. . ."
What Phillips might have wanted is characters and story weighed down with a subtext of standard cliché --welfare, slums, rapes, injustices, violence, and anger at "the man." Without a subliminal hint of this backstory something about the film would not sound right to many people.
I think about the title of a book that is not exactly to the point here, but the title is: Who Moved My Cheese? Film critics who are conservatives will view the movie and feel: "who moved the scapegoat?" In Hollywood where liberals are more numerous the feeling would be "who moved the victim."
George Davis is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and the creator of the 5-book, interactive, world-sourced, digital series, Barack Obama, America and the World.
