The Dawn Patrol (1938) on Netflix
In 1915 France, Major Brand commands a Royal Flying Corps squadron whose new pilots arrive with little training. Captain Courtney, who leads A Flight, clashes with him over the dawn patrol.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Major Brand leads a Royal Flying Corps squadron at an airfield in France in 1915, and sixteen of his pilots have died within two weeks, most of them replacements who came with little flying practice and no fighting experience. Headquarters orders him to send the squadron up the next morning. Captain Courtney, who leads A Flight, comes back from the dawn patrol with his friend Scott, while two of the new men do not return.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Dawn Patrol (1938)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For new closeups with his own actors, director Edmund Goulding bought three Nieuport 28 replicas from Van Nuys stunt pilot Garland Lincoln; built by Claude Flagg from Nieuport plans, the "LF-1"s had upper wing fabric that ripped during dives.
- The remake was proposed by producer Hal Wallis to Jack L. Warner in a memo dated April 30, 1938, to cash in on public awareness of the coming war after Germany annexed Austria the month before.
- The pilots of The Dawn Patrol sing "Hurrah for the Next Man That Dies", a World War I drinking song whose lyrics come from an early-19th-century poem about British soldiers struck down by plague in India, attributed to Bartholomew Dowling and W.F. Thompson.
- The melancholy "Poor Butterfly", played on a gramophone in the pilots' drinking scenes, was not published until 1916, making it an anachronism.
- Of the several films Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone made together, The Dawn Patrol is the only one in which their characters are on the same side, though they still spar as in their other roles.
