Wheels Up!

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MEMPHIS BELLE

Directed by Michael Caton-Jones

Screenplay by Monte Merrick

There was a historic Memphis Belle, one of the armada of B-17s that bravely, and at terrible cost to both sides, failed to bomb Germany into submission during World War II. There was, as well, a previous movie that took its title from that plane: a documentary about its last mission, which director William Wyler made for the government in 1944. Despite the propaganda imperatives imposed on it, his film was rightly praised for its realistic portrayal of war in the air.

Wyler's daughter Catherine is a producer and the chief instigator of the new, fictive Memphis Belle, which displays the same flaws and virtues as her father's work. Despite the passage of a demythifying half-century, this well- cast plane crew (Matthew Modine and Eric Stoltz, among others) remains as wartime Hollywood insisted on imagining it. These men are of diverse backgrounds, grousing (but never cynical), scared (but never immobilized), setting aside their small, usually comical, differences to form a unit that, in both efficiency and common decency, no tyranny could hope to beat. The presence of a smarmy p.r. officer (John Lithgow), eager to exploit the crew in a home-front media campaign celebrating their democratic virtues, signals the filmmakers' awareness of wartime fabulism. But their own nostalgic prettifications are hardly more realistic, or penetrating.

Yet once the Belle is airborne, it is hard to think of any movie that has more vividly portrayed the sheer terror of being in a big tin can as it is kicked through the skies by flak and assaulted by swarms of fighters. In this, its better half, Memphis Belle achieves something like epic proportions. Out of an authentic emotion -- fear -- it finally forges the kind of unshakable link with an audience that the sweet, stale cliches of male bonding could never sustain.