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Birds of Prey

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Birds of Prey (1973)

January. 30,1973
|
6.6
|
PG
| Action Thriller TV Movie
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Harry Walker, a former military pilot, works as a helicopter pilot and traffic reporter for a Salt Lake City radio station. One day while working he observes a bank robbery in progress and the kidnapping of a young woman who worked at the bank. Harry goes into pursuit which leads to an exciting conclusion.

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Reviews

Beystiman
1973/01/30

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

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Mathilde the Guild
1973/01/31

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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Ginger
1973/02/01

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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Rexanne
1973/02/02

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

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kgowen-1
1973/02/03

I put this in my Netflix queue based on the strong comments I read here. Boy, was I disappointed. The idea, a chase involving not cars but helicopters, has good potential, but it was executed poorly. This is a low-budget movie and it shows. The soundtrack was jarring and incongruous and sometimes Walker is seen in the helicopter moving his mouth in all sorts of strange contortions, but I guess this is because when this movie was originally shown, the music in the soundtrack was different.The dialog was clunky and the relationship between Walker and the young girl was poorly thought-out and developed. The acting ranged from poor to fair; David Janssen never was all that good of an actor, but here he is adequate in a role that doesn't require much.There's also a major continuity error when he stops to commandeer a fuel truck. Walker parks the helicopter on the highway, but then after he fuels up, the helicopter is clearly seen taking off from an open field, with the highway nowhere in sight.I don't think this movie was good even by 1973 standards, and 35 years later, it is almost laughable.

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gerdeen-1
1973/02/04

I've seen "Birds of Prey" only once, decades ago, but I remember it as great fun. It's also a piece of cultural history. It first aired on TV in January 1973, as the U.S. war in Vietnam was officially rushing to an end, and it's a cops-and-robbers adventure about helicopters, the chariots of choice of that conflict.The setting is a big city in the American West. The villains are robbers -- Vietnam vets, perhaps? -- who make their getaway by chopper. The squabbling heroes are two middle-aged men who served together in World War II. One of them (played by Ralph Meeker) is now a successful bureaucrat, serving as the city's police chief. The other (played by David Janssen) is somewhere between a free spirit and a ne'er-do-well, a man who flies a traffic helicopter to earn a living but has never left behind the memories of the air war of his youth. When the robbers take to the skies, the battle of the generations is on.They didn't call such men such as Meeker's and Janssen's characters "the greatest generation" in 1973. They called them "the establishment." This movie is nostalgia for the simplicities of World War II before such nostalgia was fashionable.If the DVD version does indeed feature modern rock instead of the original movie's 1940s sound track, it's a shame. But maybe it's inevitable. Now that the World War II veterans have grown old and the Vietnam veterans have taken their place in the middle-aged zone, few viewers would recognize the great big band standards. Alas, time flies. Like a bird.

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bobbyp1966
1973/02/05

...and then some. David Janssen plays a military-vet-turned-newschopper-pilot in Salt Lake City who happens upon a bank robbery involving the baddies, a female hostage and an Aerospatiale Llama; Thus, it's off to the rescue in his trusty Hughes 500D, tailing the baddies and along the way: Rescuing the female hostage, blockading a fuel truck on the freeway for a fill-up, and camping out under the stars in the desert wilds (Flying helos that low at night isn't entirely safe, as the Army can adequately prove). In the climactic ending, both helicopters duel it out at an abandoned desert airstrip where the baddies and law converge, and finally, David's character's Hughes 500 collides with the Llama in mid-air. But the story resumes in a dare-to-sequel ending as the awaiting baddies flee in a Cessna 206, with the law in hot pursuit. Excellent action/adventure movie from the '70s, should be archived alongside the greats as "Two-Lane Blacktop", "Vanishing Point" and "Duel".

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Patrick E. Abe
1973/02/06

I'm not 100% sure if I saw this TV movie when it first appeared on ABC because this was before my family had a VCR. However, I must have, since I recall "Three Little Fishies" and "I'll Get By" playing during the course of the movie. Some years later, I saw it listed on TBS and fired up the non-HiFi Betamax to capture this "aerial cops-and-robbers" movie. (Alas, none of the surviving Betamaxes can play the tape, so it's all a matter of unreliable memory. No, I didn't get a VHS unit until the VCR wars were over.) At first glance, it looked like a routine movie about a helicopter pilot going about an ordinary day, with a traffic jam and sunbathing beauties to liven up his day. The opening sequence referring to his days as a Flying Tiger and the testy relationship with his ex-buddy-turned police captain should have been a tipoff that things were going to get interesting. Then there was the break in at the military weapons depot by fur-faced, sunglass wearing perpetrators who were OK within killing anyone who stood in their way. Unlike the technowizardry found in "Blue Thunder," Harry walker has only the tools at hand to face down a set of not-ready-for-peacetime military veterans. As the only game in town once an ordinary bank heist turned into an aerial pursuit, this movie shows why Tom Brokaw would call such folk "The Greatest Generation." Considering what kinds of special efx were available at that time, this movie shows what a difference between the real thing vs. the green screen DFX-safe world of today. (As with screenplays, Real trumps Imagination or even "Reimagining".) A chance search on Amazon.com for a butchered VHS version yielded an "On Order" notation. Release of "Birds of Prey" is set for July 12, 2005, and I'll be there to fly the spacious skies of Utah once again, even if "Three Little Fishies" or "I'll Get By" aren't in the soundtrack.

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