633 Squadron (1964)

[Antonius_Block]

@Johnny L.A.

But with the bad casting, the poor acting, the ridiculous maneuvering of the models, the sackful of clichés, the bad direction and the unimaginative camerawork, there is one thing 633 Squadron has that I’ll watch it for: The Mosquitos.

I saw 633 Squadron when I was a child, before developing my awesome critical faculties[sup]TM/sup, and loved it. The clichés weren’t clichés to me, and I knew nothing about quality acting or directing. Even as a kid, I realized that there was something special about the Mosquito. I doubt that I’d watch it again, because I would probably cringe at the faults that you list. If someone puts together a montage of the flying scenes, I’d watch that.

However, it’s almost certainly not the worst Mosquito movie out there. A couple of years ago, I caught the execrable Mosquito Squadron (1969) on late-night TV. At first, I thought it must have been a showing of 633 Squadron (with the name changed for the US market?), because so much of it seemed familiar. Then the plot started to diverge, and I couldn’t remember David McCallum being in the version that I’d seen as a child. As the film got worse and worse before my eyes, I realized that it was a horrible recycled semi-remake, using a great deal of 633 Squadron’s aerial footage and much of its plot! The final target was different (they used Barnes Wallis bouncing bombs on land!, which makes it the evil hellspawn of both 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters). I think that there was some new Mosquito aerial footage, so it might be worth a Netflix rental, but otherwise it was a shameful waste of film.

[Malacandra]

There was a version of the Dambuster bomb (“Upkeep”) that was intended to be dropped by Mosquitos, but it (“Highball”) was never deployed operationally.

And wouldn’t have been dropped on land in any case. :smack:

[Johnny_L.A]

I wonder why 633squadron hasn’t posted?

[Ale]

@Johnny L.A.

That I don’t know. IIRC the makers of The Battle Of Britain were surprised to find something like 27 airworthy Spitfires in the world. But they only found four Hurricanes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were full-sized replica Hurricanes available.

That´s partly to blame for the Hurricane construction technique; the early ones had wooden wings, and all retained the welded tube tail section covered with canvas. Besides, the Hurricanes where retired from service much earlier than the Spitfires and it´s production finished in 1944, so I guess that most of them where “spent” on the war or scraped during it.