5 Forgotten Combat Aviation Movies About WW1 Ranked!

Five WW1 aviation films where every plane on screen was real, every stunt was real, and the director of #1 was an actual combat pilot who flew in the war. From Howard Hughes' four-million-dollar obsession to the first film that ever won Best Picture, this is aviation cinema before safety nets and CGI existed. The list opens with The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), George Roy Hill's elegy to barnstormers and leftover aces, starring Robert Redford as a former combat pilot doing loops over cornfields for a quarter a head. Hill hired Frank Tallman, the best stunt pilot alive, and shot real planes doing real things with real cameras — no matte paintings, no models. The film flopped and Hill said it broke his heart, but the flying sequences are the genuine article. The Blue Max (1966) follows at #4, John Guillermin's German-perspective dogfight picture shot over Ireland with a fleet of real Fokker D.VII and S.E.5a replicas. George Peppard, Ursula Andress, and James Mason star; John Glen — who later directed half the Bond films — cut the aerial footage with an editor's understanding that an airplane on screen needs to feel like it weighs something. The Dawn Patrol (1938) lands at #3, Edmund Goulding's remake that hits harder than Howard Hawks' original. Errol Flynn, David Niven, and Basil Rathbone deliver performances that belong in a different conversation than most war films of the era — Flynn's transformation from cocky ace to hollowed-out commander is among the most devastating arcs in aviation cinema. At #2, Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) — the most insane production story in Hollywood history. Hughes bought 87 vintage aircraft, started shooting as a silent film, scrapped it when sound arrived, crashed his own plane and fractured his skull, lost three stunt pilots, and spent four million 1930 dollars on a picture that aged him twenty years. Jean Harlow walks off with the whole thing. And at #1, Wings (1927), directed by William Wellman — a man who didn't research WW1 aviation for the film because he'd lived it. Wellman flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps, got shot down, and came home with a Croix de Guerre and a busted back. The first film ever to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, starring Clara Bow, Charles Rogers, and Richard Arlen, shot with real planes flying real maneuvers with cameras mounted on the wings. Everything on this list stands on its shoulders.