User reviews

The Dora is a photographic unit plane the sort that flies over enemy locations and takes pictures for the wonks to figure out what the items of military importance are. It's not about the Dora, but, as the title states, her crew, all good-looking young men. It starts out with Josef Dahmen about to be married to Charlott Daudert, but she changes her mind at the last minute. This means that his mates try to deal with his depression by hooking him up with another girl.

This and other plots about the love life of German Luftwaffe crew makes up about half the movie. The other half consists of most of the crew in the African campaign, stranded in the desert and waiting for rescue that seems will never come.

In other words, it's an ordinary war movie, competently made by Karl Ritter. He has a reputation of being a bad film maker, a reputation I feel that is based on the large amounts of propaganda in his movies from the middle of the 1930s; yes, it's there, and it's annoying, but somehow no one ever complains about the propaganda content of Soviet films from the 1920s and 1930s. Looking at Ritter, I will freely admit that as a writer-director-producer, he was not a great writer, but here, with a standard sort of adventure movie, with the propaganda not noticeable, it's a nice flick.