The Yellow Squadron (1954)

Awesome Movie

Admirable film.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A flic of mind-boggling worthlessness. Only aficionados passionately in love with airplanes are likely to find anything of interest in it. There's no plot, the dialog is badly written and the actors don't seem to be very pleased with wasting their talent. Some of them have actually made good performances in other movies. It's a disgrace to Swedish cinema and it almost defies the imagination that this movie that should never have been made in the first place is available on DVD.What we're supposed to pay to watch and listen to is, besides a great many airplanes making a lot of noise and the dramatic line "You're too close, yellow (gula) 5!", the "story" of the bad guy who threatens to tell the officers that the good guy's dad is in jail so he can't become an officer and the good guy has to lend the bad guy 10 Swedish crowns (about a dollar and a half), but it turns out that the major knew all the time so the good guy gets his dollar back from the bad guy and he can become an officer!

As a background: In the 50:es the Swedish Air Force was the third biggest in the world. The "J29 SAAB Tunnan" was as good as the best US (Sabre) and Soviet (Mig15) air fighters. Tunnan held for a time the world speed record at the distance of 500 km. Tunnan was in UN Service in Kongo, and made a substantial contribution to the UN victory.

This movie gives a good view of the everyday life of a Swedish Air Force aviator in the early 1950's. It shows several interesting aspects, ranging from flying practice to live fire practice, and even emergency situations (seeing that magnificent Catalina gives me goose-pimples). A large part of the movie also focuses on the personal life of the aviators. This also has interesting elements, such as the surprising level of equality between the sexes, keeping in mind that this is a 1950's movie.To sum it up, it's a must-see for all of you with a genuine interest in aviation and Swedish military history! The quality of the J 29 Tunnan footage is excellent. And if that isn't enough, you also get to see some truly death-defying stunts being pulled off by a SAAB Safir.

You wouldn't expect a film from 1954 to contain these many aircrafts and shots up in the air. Especially not if it's a swedish film from 1954. Some effects like explosions are not as thrustworthy as others, and when an aircraft (SAAB Tunnan) crashes, after having to little fuel to make it to the strip, they use some kind of wooden model to replace the aircraft in the scenes. The real aircraft has a smooth shape while the model is edgy and uneven. This made me laugh a bit until i made myself realize it was made almost a half decade ago.Anyway, the plot is not one of the best, but if you're an aircraft fanatic this is a funny picture to watch.