True war story of Buck, Bucky ...and the Bloody Hundredth
◆ Masters of the Air, a nine-part drama from Steven Spielberg, spares nothing in recreating the terror of aerial conflict in the Second World War, writes Aidan Smith
If you’re a bit sketchy on what happened in the Second World War, maybe a bit jingoistic and a bit cynical too, you might approach Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air thinking: “Oh no, not more cokamamie revisionism about how America won it for us!” Well, the story told in this Apple TV+ nine-parter is true. Among the US troops who were, as the old jibe went, “over-paid, over-sexed and over here”, the 100th Bomb Group based themselves in East Anglia for daring raids on Nazi Germany.
Nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth”, the fly-guys answer to “Bubbles”, “Crank” and “Meatball” and they come from all over the States, as confirmed by the pins they place on a large map, although many won’t ever see home again.
It’s somewhat chilling to be watching this towering drama build to the perilous aerial missions while our military chiefs press the case for conscription in the event of another war. I mean, I’ll be bagging a canteen job if called up. What can you do for king and country?
Those missions – you’ll watch them with hearts in mouths but hopefully not supper on the floor, like some of the tail-gunners. Spielberg, who produces with Tom Hanks for this follow-up to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, is rumoured to have spent $300 million on moving the theatre of war to the skies and spares nothing in recreating the claustrophobia and the terror of being strapped into in a tiny cockpit or ball-turret as the enemy’s shells burst holes in the fuselages of the B-17 Flying Fortresses.
Right from the start, the surging theme music bursts holes in your traditional reserve, causing stiff upper lips to quiver, and we first encounter the dashing duo of Bucky and Buck – respectively Maj John Egan and Maj Gale Cleven and seemingly inseparable, although that may not be a word these guys can depend upon.
Egan is played by Callum Turner, one of ours, and you’ll spot other Brits as Americans plus the Dublin-born and currently very hot Barry Keoghan whose Lt Curtis Biddick is first to share a cockpit with Cleven, played by Austin Butler.
By the way, the latter was last seen as Elvis Presley while Keoghan comes to Masters of the Air from Saltburn and the Murder on the Dancefloor naked finale with his joystick waggling, so these two definitely enjoy what all actors crave – variety. The same goes for Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor Who, appearing later in the series.
Some don’t make it to the end of the first episode as the Bloody Hundredth’s losses were huge. In a drama of thin moustaches and big fur collars, the B-17s are great, lumbering beasts which must fly together “so damn tight a dime can’t slip through the wing tips”.
That seems to make them all the more vulnerable to the nimble Jerry fighter planes, although, really, what do I know, or want to know, when as a forced enlistee I’d be content peeling the spuds back on the ground.
Eighty years on, the mechanics are frighteningly modest: pumped starts, thumped pedals, temperamental wheels requiring belly landings and all the while airmen from the precomputer age hunched and struggling with maps and rulers under showers of exploding glass.
Hardly surprisingly, the barrackroom banter is gloomy to the point of fatalistic. Breakfast on the morning of missions is called “The Last Supper”.
Bucky, fortunate to return from his first sortie, says to Buck, who’s already been up: “You didn’t tell me it was like that.” Buck: “I didn’t like to say. You’ve seen it now.” Bucky: “I don’t know what I saw. Thirty guys just … ”
Nicole Kidman is top billing in Expats (Prime Video) but the real star of this drama is Hong Kong, stunningly shot
by director Lulu Wang as the action switches from the crowded, chaotic street-markets to the cool, quiet privilege of luxury apartments high above the throng.
Actually, “action” is pushing it. The pace of the six-parter is slow and sombre while Kidman’s Margaret stumbles from grief to guilt and back again over the disappearance of her youngest boy the year before.
Her state is near-catatonic and although she has a husband, Clarke, and two other children, she confesses to a neighbour: “I love my family, but I have this growing desire to leave them.”
Sometimes she’ll drift off to a grotty flat she’s rented to squeeze herself into a purple plastic bathtub probably once used by her boy.
The neighbour is Hilary who’s own marriage is collapsing and a third American expat, twentysomething Mercy, is struggling in the gig economy. She must take work when she can find it and visits from her married lover when he feels like them.
A typical job is waitressing at Clarke’s 50th birthday party, both parents putting on brave faces, but where there are bitchy whispers from one local: “The only reason their case got so much attention is they’re so photogenic.”
Initially we don’t know how Gus went missing but judging by Margaret’s freak-out at the party it’s got something to do with Mercy.
For then you work out that was the latter’s voice at the beginning, listing those who’ve caused other tragedies, however unwittingly: “No one wants to hear about the kid who paralysed his twin, the driver who fell asleep at the wheel or the pilots who took down a cable car, but I want to know the perpetrators. People like me… can they be forgiven?”
Mercy has definitely got something to do with Hilary’s plight – she’s the other woman in the infidelity, a secret for now. So lives are precarious. The politics of the region are precarious with the Umbrella Revolution ongoing as students protest against Chinese interference. And Hong Kong is both seductive and scary in a grimly compelling tale.
Sexy Beast is probably the main reason Ray Winstone is never off our screens, utilising that highly persuasive cockney gangster voice to promote sports gambling, with football fans encouraged to throw away money by betting on throw-ins.
It’s a gamble to attempt a prequel to the 2000 movie but Paramount+ might have pulled it off with the help of the Scottish duo of James Mcardle and Emun Elliott.
There’s a good visual gag at the start of the three-parter, Mcardle as Gal Dove mimicking the sun-worshipping Winstone, only he’s not on the Costa del Crime but squeezed into a kid’s blow-up
Some don’t make it to the end of the first episode
swimming pool surrounded by junk on a London rooftop.
It’s the early 1990s, the time of “wave parties” according to Dove’s gran (she means rave, of course). He’s getting married but soon has his head turned by a Soho porn actress, telling her how he became a “feef ” after the Queen’s visit to his housing estate and tartedup wasteground was returned to its previous state when the Royals departed.
More daring and lucrative holdups – and the chance to kick the establishment some more – come in the company of screw-loose sidekick Don Logan. Does Ben Kingsley in the original daunt Elliott? No, he shoots straight past the chromedomed thesp knight’s portrayal to go full and tonto Joe Pesci.
Masters of the Air (Appletv+), Expats (Prime Video), Sexy Beast (Paramount+)