Saturday and Sunday are rest days, especially during the winter. Once the weather turns nicer I'm busy at the drop zone; especially now that I'm an instructor.

But it's winter here in the Southeast and it has rained this weekend so I have had a rare opportunity to goof off.

I watched a war movie from 1952 - The Red Ball Express which is about the truckers who kept General Patton's tanks and troops supplied with gasoline, ammo, and other neccessities.

The movie is formulaic: As the unit forms we find out that the Lieutenant and the First Sargeant have some bad blood between them stemming from an incident in their civilian lives. Geez, will they resolve this and become bestest of friends by the time the credits roll? We also have a likeable, wisecracking ne'er-do-well who falls in love with a saucy french blonde.

What is different about this movie is it features three Black soldiers (Sidney Poitier is one of them). I thought it was a little odd to have an integrated unit in a World War II movie; 1952 is a little early for political correctness (I am forever amused by Force 10 from Navarrone and how it managed to sneak Carl Weathers on the team).

As it turns out, most of the truckers on the real Red Ball Express were black; they were not used in combat units in World War II. So the movie cheats out by making most of them white but I think context is important when trying to make some kind of moral judgement on this movie. At least they had some blacks and did try to bring up something of the uneasiness at the integration. This movie could have been a lot more whitewashed than it was.

The formula stuff got to me, though. In an amused way.

Speaking of context, I am in the middle of watching The Dam Busters a british movie about the development of bouncing bombs. I will refer you to Liz Kingsley's review for more information about what I mean about context. One of the officers in the movie has a pet dog which he named Nigger. In context, this was not a malicious slur. More modern audiences have a tough time handling this hence it is tough to get an uncensored copy of this movie, or even find one.

I would say instead of censoring it, if the distributors have a tough time with it, why not put a post script explaining the context? Pretending it never happened doesn't mean it didn't.

Read Liz's review, anyway. She does a fantastic job of detailing the difference between British and American World War II movies.

And speaking of, The Battle of Britain is next on my queue. The cast alone is enough to get me excited.