The Rear Gunner (1943)

Very Cool!!!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Pee Wee Williams joins the US Army Air Corps and eventually gets selected to train as an air gunner. We see his training and then how he handles the real thing - aerial combat.Made in the middle of WW2, so you already know it's a propaganda film. Is reasonably interesting though, despite its marketing-orientation and military inaccuracies. Also has a folksy charm.Cast includes Burgess Meredith as Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as the pilot of his B-24.

. . . while the other was sentenced to eight years in the White House shooting gallery. That's the story of THE REAR GUNNER, where Burgess Meredith is blasting away at the Enemy, and Ronald Reagan is just his pilot, along for the ride. It is men like Meredith's R.E.L.A. "Peewee" Williams who are presented as the REAL war heroes, "the budding Galahads of Gunnery." Though some of these "Freedom Fighters" seem to be in it primarily to improve their odds of winning carnival midway shooting gallery Kewpie doll prizes (like PeeWee's classmate, "Benny"), most of these "flexible gunners" were too small to make their high school football teams, making them the perfect fit for the cramped quarters of the B-24 bomber gunnery positions. PeeWee wins a Distinguished Service Medal for his success in launching sneak attacks from the rear position. He's shown here bringing down several Japanese Zero fighter planes, thanks to his boyhood pursuit of gunning down "black killer" crows in Kansas. (The latter were decimating the duck population.) One might sum up by saying that PeeWee won one (or two, or three) for the Gipper.

The Aircraft in the movie is a B-24 Liberator and not a B-17 Flying Fortress. The B-17 was the first long range heavy bomber used by the U.S.A.A.F. The B-24 could carry a heavier bomb load. The B-24 could fly longer range than the B-17, which is was designed to augment in the arsenal of air power. The rear gun position did not look as in the movie, but was probably used to allow the viewer to see Burgess Meredith. The top turret shown in the film was never used on the B-24 or the B-17. That turret would have been found on the Martin bomber of the 30s and not used afterwards. In several shots they also showed Lockheed Hudsons as the bomber being flown. Hudsons were used greatly by the Brits, especially in their "moonlight squadron" operations. Agents were flown in Hudsons to occupied territory in the Hudson, although this was not the only use for the Hudson. A multitude of craft were used to parachute them.

"A short film bout a B-17 gunner starring Burgess Meredith and Ronald Reagan. Approximately 20 minutes - B & W."I guess, back in 1943, you were supposed to join the armed forces after seeing this short film. It's pretty much a recruitment film. Meredith plays a stuttering soldier who finds his place as a rear gunner aboard a B-17. Ronald Reagan plays the part of the pilot.I found this film on a DVD of WWII films that I bought at Wal-Mart for about five dollars.It's a great film to make fun of with your friends. Just imagine all the lines from Rocky and Grumpy Old Men that you can quote while watching Meredith shoot down Japanese fighters over the Pacific.