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That's how Mr. Nonchalant got into Pilot's Heaven
Move over, Jack Benny. Learn and Live (1943) officially represents the wackiest of my encounters to date with the genre of metaphysical fantasy sometimes and somewhat misleadingly known as film blanc. For its inaugural production in the fall of 1942, the newly activated First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces addressed itself to the perennial and patriotically urgent problem of pilot error, the kinds of oversights, miscalculations, and bad habits that might earn a fellow a posthumous raspberry in peacetime, but mustn't be allowed to waste men and materiel in war. I just want to know at what point in the process the decision was made to cast Guy Kibbee as Saint Peter.
With the macabre imagination of a public information film, Learn and Live frames its moral with the arrival of Joe Instructor at Pilot's Heaven, its pearly gates prominently crowned with the five-pointed winged star of the AAF. Played with seen-it-all square jaw by an uncredited James Seay, he's the rare mortal summoned topside still living in hopes of reducing the number of pilots who untimely earn their wings: forget the human tragedy, it's causing a housing shortage. "This place is getting as bad as a Washington hotel," grouses Kibbee's Pete, resplendently outfitted with a halo of actual neon. "These boys keep coming up here, cluttering up the place. I get complaints from A-4. They can't provide enough supplies. And the quartermaster's griping, too—" Extending the implications of celestial mobilization, his overcrowded domain appears as a sort of spectral rec room where the dead airmen, their uniformed shoulders ornamented with small white cardboard wings, drift among pool tables and games of cards and ping-pong, maintaining their G.I. haircuts and building models to make up for the real planes their deaths have forever barred them from flying, even peering wistfully over the edges of heaven like the one poor slob "still trying to see the field he overshot." Miniature golf is played into the nineteenth hole. All the billiard balls are eight. It might be fairer to call it a Pilot's Purgatory, especially once we discover what is conspicuously lacking among all these dandy games—at the sight of a hand-drawn pin-up, Pete's halo momentarily fritzes. In short, this chaste and fog-bound limbo is nowhere a red-blooded, all-American flyboy wants to land himself, but again and again the vignettes narrated by Joe and illustrated by the stunt pilots of the 18th AAF Base Unit lead inexorably back to this club of rueful shades who learned their lessons too late. "You see, the wise boys know all the rules and they're all right. But the chumps seem to think that playing it safe is a sissy's game."
The Dantean conceit alone would make this training film worthy of comment, but the implementation is buck wild. Just at the point where the picture seems to have settled into a succession of cautionary reenactments, it cuts the realism with an animated appearance by "our old friend Mr. Oil Temperature Gauge," supplied with the voice of Mel Blanc the better to scold the dazed and bleeding airman who ignored his readings: "Did you think Uncle Sam trained you for months just to crack up?" When another trainee can't keep his mind off the girl he was just cutting a rug with, her double-exposure phantom snuggles up to him in the cockpit until he "dopes off" and bellyflops with his landing gear—oh, Freud—still up. A verbal smash cut into a Broadway show allows the seats left vacant by the demise of an impatient pilot to be taken by the grouchy, iced-up "Mr. Carburetor," who re-interrupts the fourth wall to stage a lesson on proper attention to carburetor temperature in the hard-sell style of a carnival talker. After a particularly gnarly crash, the smoldering wreckage irises out to the bluegrass stylings of the R.I.P. Band and their heckling filk of "The Titanic"—It went in one ear and directly out the other 'cause there wasn't a thing in between. Oh, he was bold, he was bold! Now they're scraping his plane off the trees. Joe sounds just as eye-rolling as he describes most of the stupid, avoidable, self-inflicted smash-ups that populate Pilot's Heaven. "He's one of those hurry-up boys with propellers in his pants. Man, he can't wait to get upstairs! Preparing for flight is just a waste of time for him. He wants to be the big pie in the sky." It's a clever, slightly shocking choice of tone. Not only will you find yourself trapped in the world's dryest bar and never get laid again if you kill yourself like any of these clowns, Learn and Live warns, your buddies will drag you mercilessly for all eternity. The sarcasm does let up occasionally, fortunately without swapping it for corn. A conscientious airman winds up just as dead as his sloppier colleagues when his own best friend's embarrassment over reporting the damage sustained in a wheel-crunching landing sends him test-flying in a plane that should have been grounded. The daredevil antics of a barnstorming hotshot are given the newsreel treatment with supreme side-eye, but when he manages to flambé himself in front of his girl, the shot of her horrified scream isn't a punch line. There are odd, sly touches of the numinous, such as the Earth-viewing telescope whose farthest setting is "infinity." Less felicitously to twenty-first-century sensibilities, there is also the whammy of a full-blast paean to American fossil fuels that effectively pleads with its audience not to let that Carboniferous swamp have died in vain. I can't be bored by Joe's extra-diegetic summing-up, though, when it interpolates a quotation from General "Hap" Arnold, a last word from Mr. Oil Temperature Gauge, and an exasperated inversion of Patton's famous dictum: "Your job is to kill the enemy, not yourselves."
I can't help wondering if the notion of a heaven of pilots was at all influenced by Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), conducting its souls across the river like a commercial airline, but the earlier film may have been needed only to establish the Hollywood template for bureaucracy of the afterlife—certainly no one in Learn and Live has the divine standing of Claude Rains, unless it's Joe Instructor, descending from the cloud-racked gates of Pilot's Heaven to the rolling hills of Culver City like an angel himself, a messenger of safer ways to slip the surly bonds. Edwin Gilbert doesn't let the screenplay overstay its serious joke and Bernard Vorhaus, who had polished his direction on the British quota quickies, keeps its freewheeling more or less on track and even turns in a cameo under his own rank of captain. At no point does it not feel like propaganda, but at no point does it fail to entertain, either. The film is a bonanza for viewers who like vintage aircraft, provided that viewers like vintage aircraft being totaled. You want to watch a Stearman faceplant into a barn? A B-24 take out a hangar? A T-6 in mountainous bad weather fail at calling Barranca? Have you come to the right movie. By the time Learn and Live had begun production at the Hal Roach Studios, the commanding officer of the unit was the legendary Paul Mantz and I find it hard to believe that he would have stuck to desk-jockeying when there were aerial stunts to be executed with his trademark precision. Even the scenes that rely more heavily on model work, however, like a vertical dive unraveling the wing off a P-39, don't suddenly cheapen the effect and the effect is really something. It is the "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012) of the USAAF. It is less pure nightmare fuel, but not much more rational than One Got Fat (1963). For reasons impenetrable to me, the 45-minute film has been uploaded to YouTube in two unequal parts, each bearing a different title as if the collector didn't realize they belonged to the same project despite the obvious continuity; do not be fooled into missing out on the aerobatics. Just remember, never stretch a glide. This job brought to you by my upstairs backers at Patreon.
With the macabre imagination of a public information film, Learn and Live frames its moral with the arrival of Joe Instructor at Pilot's Heaven, its pearly gates prominently crowned with the five-pointed winged star of the AAF. Played with seen-it-all square jaw by an uncredited James Seay, he's the rare mortal summoned topside still living in hopes of reducing the number of pilots who untimely earn their wings: forget the human tragedy, it's causing a housing shortage. "This place is getting as bad as a Washington hotel," grouses Kibbee's Pete, resplendently outfitted with a halo of actual neon. "These boys keep coming up here, cluttering up the place. I get complaints from A-4. They can't provide enough supplies. And the quartermaster's griping, too—" Extending the implications of celestial mobilization, his overcrowded domain appears as a sort of spectral rec room where the dead airmen, their uniformed shoulders ornamented with small white cardboard wings, drift among pool tables and games of cards and ping-pong, maintaining their G.I. haircuts and building models to make up for the real planes their deaths have forever barred them from flying, even peering wistfully over the edges of heaven like the one poor slob "still trying to see the field he overshot." Miniature golf is played into the nineteenth hole. All the billiard balls are eight. It might be fairer to call it a Pilot's Purgatory, especially once we discover what is conspicuously lacking among all these dandy games—at the sight of a hand-drawn pin-up, Pete's halo momentarily fritzes. In short, this chaste and fog-bound limbo is nowhere a red-blooded, all-American flyboy wants to land himself, but again and again the vignettes narrated by Joe and illustrated by the stunt pilots of the 18th AAF Base Unit lead inexorably back to this club of rueful shades who learned their lessons too late. "You see, the wise boys know all the rules and they're all right. But the chumps seem to think that playing it safe is a sissy's game."
The Dantean conceit alone would make this training film worthy of comment, but the implementation is buck wild. Just at the point where the picture seems to have settled into a succession of cautionary reenactments, it cuts the realism with an animated appearance by "our old friend Mr. Oil Temperature Gauge," supplied with the voice of Mel Blanc the better to scold the dazed and bleeding airman who ignored his readings: "Did you think Uncle Sam trained you for months just to crack up?" When another trainee can't keep his mind off the girl he was just cutting a rug with, her double-exposure phantom snuggles up to him in the cockpit until he "dopes off" and bellyflops with his landing gear—oh, Freud—still up. A verbal smash cut into a Broadway show allows the seats left vacant by the demise of an impatient pilot to be taken by the grouchy, iced-up "Mr. Carburetor," who re-interrupts the fourth wall to stage a lesson on proper attention to carburetor temperature in the hard-sell style of a carnival talker. After a particularly gnarly crash, the smoldering wreckage irises out to the bluegrass stylings of the R.I.P. Band and their heckling filk of "The Titanic"—It went in one ear and directly out the other 'cause there wasn't a thing in between. Oh, he was bold, he was bold! Now they're scraping his plane off the trees. Joe sounds just as eye-rolling as he describes most of the stupid, avoidable, self-inflicted smash-ups that populate Pilot's Heaven. "He's one of those hurry-up boys with propellers in his pants. Man, he can't wait to get upstairs! Preparing for flight is just a waste of time for him. He wants to be the big pie in the sky." It's a clever, slightly shocking choice of tone. Not only will you find yourself trapped in the world's dryest bar and never get laid again if you kill yourself like any of these clowns, Learn and Live warns, your buddies will drag you mercilessly for all eternity. The sarcasm does let up occasionally, fortunately without swapping it for corn. A conscientious airman winds up just as dead as his sloppier colleagues when his own best friend's embarrassment over reporting the damage sustained in a wheel-crunching landing sends him test-flying in a plane that should have been grounded. The daredevil antics of a barnstorming hotshot are given the newsreel treatment with supreme side-eye, but when he manages to flambé himself in front of his girl, the shot of her horrified scream isn't a punch line. There are odd, sly touches of the numinous, such as the Earth-viewing telescope whose farthest setting is "infinity." Less felicitously to twenty-first-century sensibilities, there is also the whammy of a full-blast paean to American fossil fuels that effectively pleads with its audience not to let that Carboniferous swamp have died in vain. I can't be bored by Joe's extra-diegetic summing-up, though, when it interpolates a quotation from General "Hap" Arnold, a last word from Mr. Oil Temperature Gauge, and an exasperated inversion of Patton's famous dictum: "Your job is to kill the enemy, not yourselves."
I can't help wondering if the notion of a heaven of pilots was at all influenced by Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), conducting its souls across the river like a commercial airline, but the earlier film may have been needed only to establish the Hollywood template for bureaucracy of the afterlife—certainly no one in Learn and Live has the divine standing of Claude Rains, unless it's Joe Instructor, descending from the cloud-racked gates of Pilot's Heaven to the rolling hills of Culver City like an angel himself, a messenger of safer ways to slip the surly bonds. Edwin Gilbert doesn't let the screenplay overstay its serious joke and Bernard Vorhaus, who had polished his direction on the British quota quickies, keeps its freewheeling more or less on track and even turns in a cameo under his own rank of captain. At no point does it not feel like propaganda, but at no point does it fail to entertain, either. The film is a bonanza for viewers who like vintage aircraft, provided that viewers like vintage aircraft being totaled. You want to watch a Stearman faceplant into a barn? A B-24 take out a hangar? A T-6 in mountainous bad weather fail at calling Barranca? Have you come to the right movie. By the time Learn and Live had begun production at the Hal Roach Studios, the commanding officer of the unit was the legendary Paul Mantz and I find it hard to believe that he would have stuck to desk-jockeying when there were aerial stunts to be executed with his trademark precision. Even the scenes that rely more heavily on model work, however, like a vertical dive unraveling the wing off a P-39, don't suddenly cheapen the effect and the effect is really something. It is the "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012) of the USAAF. It is less pure nightmare fuel, but not much more rational than One Got Fat (1963). For reasons impenetrable to me, the 45-minute film has been uploaded to YouTube in two unequal parts, each bearing a different title as if the collector didn't realize they belonged to the same project despite the obvious continuity; do not be fooled into missing out on the aerobatics. Just remember, never stretch a glide. This job brought to you by my upstairs backers at Patreon.
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I wouldn't have written about it if I hadn't thought it was worth watching! The only other reason I write about films is to argue with them. It pulls out more stops than any other WWII training film I have seen, however, including other productions of the First Motion Picture Unit and the Private Snafu cartoons.
(Personally I had never seen a B-24 take out a hangar before.)