Wings for the Eagle

Wings for the Eagle (1942)

It's Time-and-a-Half for Uncle Sam...and the Rest of the Time is for Love!

Aircraft workers during during World War II become involved in a love triangle.

Date of release
1942-07-18
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 24m
Genres
Adventure, Drama, Romance
Director
Lloyd Bacon

Casting

Interesting facts

Wings for the Eagle is a 1942 American drama film starring Ann Sheridan, Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson and George Tobias, directed by Lloyd Bacon. It tells the story of workers at a Lockheed aircraft assembly plant in the months preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the first of 11 films in which Morgan and Carson appeared together, though they did not become known as a movie "team" until a few years later.

Production

Wings for the Eagle, originally titled Shadow of Their Wings was partly set in Burbank, California near the Lockheed Corporation which had built a production facility where 45 buildings spread out over 550 acres. Warner Bros. Pictures received permission to shoot at the Lockheed plant, but, for security reasons, the film crew and actors were instructed to keep a birth certificate on them at all times.

Warner Bros. advertised the connection with Lockheed in a full-page ad in Life magazine, dedicating the film, "to the workers who actually build Wings for the Eagle. To the workers of America's Fighting aircraft industry ... men and women devoted to the new gospel "We can! We must! We Will!"

Wings for the Eagle was churned out quickly between January 12–February 1942 at both the Lockheed plant and the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company in Buffalo, New York, using a near-documentary film style. At the conclusion of the production, Sheridan, Morgan and Carson went on war bond tours together. Later, Morgan and Carson would visit hospitals and camps throughout the South Pacific during the war.

Aviation film historian Stephen Pendo in Aviation in the Cinema (1985) described how Wings for the Eagle benefited from its association with Lockheed, especially being able to photograph the ceremony highlighting the rollout of the 2,000th aircraft produced for the war effort. An interesting anecdote involved "Billy Curtis, a midget, who showed one way of solving a fuselage construction problem."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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