Wyler flew combat missions to make it, in colour, with hand-held cameras in the waist and nose of B-17s; one of his cameramen was killed on another aircraft.
The note
Wyler went up repeatedly and lost much of his hearing doing it. The film follows a single crew through their twenty-fifth mission, and its authority comes from the fact that everything in it happened to somebody. The sound is the argument for hearing it this way: engines, intercom, oxygen, the flat procedural chatter of men doing a job in a freezing aluminium tube. Public domain.
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, 1944. US Army Air Forces, First Motion Picture Unit. Directed by William Wyler. This is the film’s soundtrack: narration, score and location sound, streamed from the Internet Archive’s master. No picture — the audio is the work. A work of the United States government, and therefore free of copyright anywhere it is used.
1 January
No. 1
1944
US Army Air Forces, First Motion Picture Unit
41 min
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944). US Army Air Forces, First Motion Picture Unit. Held by the Internet Archive;
