You want to know how many World War II movies there are in the world?

What if I told you that 1990 produced a World War II film with a $23 million budget starring Matthew

Modine, Eric Stolt, Sean Aston, Billy Zane, Harry Connick Jr, David Straythorne,

and John Lithgow. You've probably never even heard of it.

The Memphis Bell was a real B-17 Flying Fortress that was successful enough in the air war over Germany

that it had a propaganda documentary made about it.

What we watched for today's episode, though, is a fictional story that does away with almost

every detail of the real history.

The crew is different, the circumstances are different.

The only thing unchanged is that the crews of these incredibly dangerous missions were given

a quota.

Survive 25 bombing runs and you get to go home.

So we start this film on the eve of the Bell's 25th mission.

And what we get is a straight down the middle story about that mission,

not the real mission, mind you, but a semi-plausible bombing

mission. I say semi because a million pet ants on the internet have quibbled with just about

every aspect of the mission that's depicted in this film,

but this is the narrative motion picture, not the newsreel documentary.

It's a weird movie because it has a hard time finding a bad guy. Sure, there's Germans, but they're mostly represented

by Ackack or the occasional harassing fighter plane.

But they're not personified or even particularly vilified.

They're just the other team.

...