Word: yank
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...best potpourris in recent film history, "A Yank in the R.A.F." offers exciting glimpses of the bombing of Berlin, the evacuation of Dunkirk, and the conquest of Grable all three feats performed by Tyrone Power without so much as messing his coiffure. The supporting cast, sparked by Reginald Gardiner as an R.A.F. volunteer from the upper crust who is just bored with it all, give sparkling comedy performances; and a horde of extras with wonderful technical direction pack conviction into the military scenes...
...Yank in the R.A.F. (20th Century-Fox) shows Tyrone Power in modern dress -and about time. As a cocky American pilot with an eye for the ladies, dark-eyed Tyrone is a Yank who fights at Dunkirk with the R.A.F. Although he feels called upon from time to time to refer to himself as "a worm," his performance is not as bad as all that, is pleasantly human...
...Yank's title adequately prefigures its plot as well as the picture's chief weakness: too much Yank, too little R.A.F. The business of getting a London cabaret queen (bountiful Betty Grable-not the slip of a girl she used to be) and Pilot Power together is so touchy that there is small time left for R.A.F.orts. Overdeveloped though it is, the story (concocted by Producer Darryl Zanuck) notably avoids most of the ruts of Hollywood's aviation epics (e.g., Tyrone Power does not even become a hero...
...realistic air sequences are the oxygen that keeps Yank alive. Best shots: swift glimpses of Spitfires slithering toward the Channel coast, close-ups of a fighter plane's eight guns blazing, a well-constructed studio version of the evacuation of Dunkirk...
...like over there?" Drawls the laconic airman: "Cloudy." The cinema's first reconstruction of the retreat from Dunkirk-which seems destined to become as useful in drama and story as the Battle of Waterloo-has a camera angle that is certainly non-Axis. Isolationist Senators might well call Yank pro-British propaganda. Even more obviously it is pro-box-office propaganda...