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The Fighting Lady Movie Review

The Fighting Lady is a 1944 documentary film directed by Edward Steichen and narrated by Robert Taylor. It’s a standard WWII documentary.

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“These little monkeys are fancy fliers“

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The plot of the film revolves around the life of seamen on board an anonymous aircraft carrier and the eventual battling with the Japanese forces. This movie received an Oscar for best documentary and it’s easy to see why as it must have been quite inspirational back in its day, but nowadays it comes across as overly patriotic and annoying in that tone of self-congratulation and call for action.

Some scenes were interesting here, especially seeing the life of these seamen. The calmer moments worked for me while the narration by Robert Taylor was fine, but at times overly patronizing, though the point that the movie makes about wars being mostly about waiting a lot was a solid one.

The Fighting Lady is at its best when focusing on its surprisingly strong technical aspects, these being the only valid reasons to honor it with an Oscar in my book. Not only is the editing strong, but so is the score. The cinematography is particularly arresting. There were so many terrific sunset sequences that were just so gorgeous to behold as the Technicolor was incredible.

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But a lot of the mileage here comes from your interest in US history and wars. I am rather tired of WWII in particular as this is an overly adapted time period on film, so the battles here, though historically authentic, were dull to me. The film is very short, running at just around sixty minutes, but it’s still not as involving as it needed to have been while the background behind the war is not given per usual with the patriotic streak being overly utilized.