Customer Reviews

Birds of Prey [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

World War II "Flying Tiger" veteran pilot Walker (David Janssen) embarks on an aerial duel with bank robbers across Utah's remote desert areas. Walker discovers the robbers in the midst of a bank heist while on his daily helicopter traffic-reporter job in Salt Lake City. He decides to pursue them after they take a young woman hostage and make their get-away in another helicopter. The police are unable to muster air support and Walker is alone as he battles the criminals over desert canyons and open plains. An interesting dynamic unfolds when the outlaws are revealed to be Vietnam War veterans.

"Birds of Prey" is a made-for-TV movie and some sequences reflect the production's constrained budget, but the aerial cinematography-with some respectable stunt flying-is pretty exciting and actor David Janssen turns in a very good performance. Overall a good feature, the first to use helicopters for an action genre, with a noble conclusion as Walker closes in on the criminals; a predecessor of other shows such as "Skywolf" and the movie "Blue Thunder."

I was in high school when I saw this made-for-TV feature and I reluctantly took for granted, like the loss of the Preternatural Gifts, that I'd never be able to watch "Birds of Prey" again. And that was sad, because knowing I'd never have my dream girl, I wanted SO badly to die the way Janssen's character does in Birds of Prey.

David Janssen plays a older-middle-age helicopter traffic personality from that universe where rotary-wing aircraft pilots can deliver sparkling banter with their hands full of resisting airframe (you know, the place where Jerry Reed and Danny Glover's characters in BAT-21 and Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson's characters from Air America come from), and who also happens to be a veteran of the romantically short-lived "Flying Tigers" mercenary unit of World War II China (before "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell brought those poor guys kicking and screaming back into the U.S. Army Air Corps).

The movie then takes us fast forward to the mid-1970s, where surviving Flying Tigers have to pay bills like everyone else, and David Janssen's roguish flyboy lives a traffic report away from unromantic unemployment, sort of an accessory for his radio station's program director to justify playing 1940s swing during drive time... Janssen's only friend in the film locale (metro Salt Lake City, Utah) is a police detective brilliantly done by Vincent Giardina (I think... someone please correct me), another tired WW II vet who has reluctantly come to terms with a world in which "the system is the hero... " (a tagline which he hurls at Janssen's romantic rogue throughout the movie).

Chaos intervenes when a high-tech crew of bandits pulls a Big Bank Job, taking several hundred thousand dollars and an attractive young cashier (I think we're talking about Sian Allen here, but I can't remember for sure) and gets away in... a chopped, channeled, stretched, primer-gray, numberless CHOPPER!

Janssen's own bird happens to be in the area of the holdup, and he immediately vectors into the airspace of the robbery, chasing the bad guys and getting his Hughes 500 (better known to Army chopper bureaucrats as the LOH-6 "Cayuse" and to guys who actually flew them as the "Loach" (an aural rendering of the acronym "LOH" for "Light Observation Helicopter") shot up for his trouble...

After the initial bawling back and forth over the radio between Janssen, his cop buddy and Everyone Else, the radio station management decides to roll with the punches and makes Janssen's chase of the Bad Guys into a media event, newsies back at the radio station cheer Janssen on as he flashes back to his own glory days, hammering Zeroes and getting his big, ugly, lethal Curtiss Warhawk hammered (the flashback scenes feature great blends of movie footage of Warhawks in battle interspersed with realistic B/W shots of Janssen's character at the yoke).

Eventually Janssen forces the bad guys down, gets into an improbable gun battle (a hunter stuck in gridlock outside Salt Lake impulsively gives a temporarily grounded Janssen his over-and-under shotgun) and gets away with both the money and the girl - and becomes the pursued, gets cornered in a canyon-and-cave system in the Utah badlands, succumbs to the sexual tension between himself and the naive, girlish cashier... then patches his plane up, leaves the girl in safety and flies the money away to distract the crooks from the girl.

I won't give away more of the film than this, except to say that Janssen's character eventually has to save his friend (afoot, running away and stumbling under chopper downdraft) from being mowed down by the bad guys in their chopper, the Janssen character screams in rage, and the scene shifts to black and white footage of a Curtiss Warhawk diving flatout at a Japanese fighter, cannons blazing... the background music track croons "...but what care I... as long as I... have youuuuu..." and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the best damn heroic death scene EVER shot in a made-for-TV movie.

And twenty-five years later... well, William Faulkner once said "You know, the men who dream of defending an abstraction with their blood haven't quite died out after the age of fifteen." (See the liner notes on Jimmy Buffett's "Somewhere Over China" for the accurate, complete quote). For guys like us, this is the movie you want to play for your date after she makes you sit through "Hope Floats" or some similar nonsense. Easily the best thing in which David Janssen ever appeared.

why did they change the original sound track?the meaning of the move changed completely.they need to put back the original sound track,then it would be a five star movie

This would have been a ***** Movie if they had left in the original TV Soundtrack with "3 Little Fishes" My Guess is Royalty issues since the movie was low-budget! But, David Janssen gave an A-#1 Performance. Try to find the Original Soundtrack with "Three Little Fishes" if available!
Charlie Neilfan