Written and Directed by Richard E. Norman
Starring Laurence Criner and Kathryn Boyd
USA, 1926
THE FLYING ACE is the only surviving film of many Race Films made by Richard E. Norman, a white guy who apparently didn’t just want to cash in on the market but also to provide positive role models and give back to the community, according to what little I’ve read.
This is one of the Race Films that doesn’t tackle any complex issues and just happens to feature an all-Black cast in a genre picture, in this case, an action adventure story about a fighter pilot from World War I who returns home to his job of railroad detective just in time to try to solve a recent kidnapping and robbery.
This is basically a super hero movie, with the fighter pilot as the hero and his one-legged engineer as his sidekick, chasing down a villain who also happens to have a plane so they can eventually end up in aerial combat. There’s also a girl that’s torn between the hero and villain.
Due to the film’s low budget, there are no high-flying stunt scenes, but the filmmakers try as best as they can with what they have, which includes full scale apparently working airplanes that can be shot as if they’re in the sky. This is no substitute for the real thing, but does a serviceable enough job giving us the idea of the kinds of action scenes we would have gotten if only the filmmakers had had the resources they deserved.
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