The Tuskegee Airmen

During the Second World War a programme is begun in the American air forces: Black pilots will be trained. The purpose of the programme is unclear; some officials expect it to fail and plan to write the report accordingly. The candidates gather at Tuskegee in Alabama. The training starts. Some are washed out, some go on. Even after they learn to fly they are not sent to the front; no assignment comes and they are kept waiting. At last a mission arrives: they will escort bombers. Robert Markowitz directs. Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr., Allen Payne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Andre Braugher are in the cast. It was made for HBO. The events are real; the pilots trained at Tuskegee were the first Black combat airmen in the American forces and the unit served in Europe. The film took Emmy nominations and won in some categories. The matter it treats is discrimination inside the military; the pilots contend with the enemy and with their own institution. There is a section at a senate hearing where whether the unit continues is argued. The flying was shot on the television budget of the period and supported with archive footage. The narrative does not show the pilots as one type; the differences of view among them are worked out too. Its limit is production; the television scale shows and the combat scenes are limited. Who it is for: viewers who like war drama and historical subjects rarely told. Who it is not for: the scale is small, the narrative conventional, and the emotional steering high.