Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
When you're asked who would be a screen hero you think of, who comes up in your head? It could be Captain America or John McClane, the male lead in the Die Hard series, played by Bruce Willis, or perhaps Atticus Finch, played by Indiana Jones or Gregory Peck. Pike's male lead in To Kill a Mockingbird). But what about me? I think of World War II pilots, with slender mustaches and well-tailored bomber jackets. There's a reason for that: because his name is David Niven.
The heroic figure comes from the memorable opening of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death. In the film, a sweaty Nevin, wearing a fashionable bomber jacket, sits in the captain's seat and courtes a switchboard operator as his incendiary plane crashes into Earth. He took the British spirit of fortitude to new heights, and after quoting Sir Walter Raleigh's famous quote and issuing a moving declaration, he jumped out of the plane and almost died. Shot at a time when an entire generation was grieving over the loss of their young soldiers, the film expresses an unusually bittersweet romanticism. During World War II, the RAF suffered a higher casualty rate than any other British army – meaning their uniforms became the most iconic embodiment of valor.
The military jacket worn by Nevin in the film is called the "B3 sheepskin jacket", or simply the "sheepskin flying jacket". It was designed by an Englishman named Leslie Irvin, whose company made and supplied the jacket for the RAF throughout the war. It soon became iconic — symbolizing the bravery of the pilots who fought against the Luftwaffe. As a result, B3 jackets began to appear on the screens of countless Allied propaganda films, from James Stewart's 1942 draft film Winning Your Wings (1942) to William Wyler's famous 1944 documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress ，1944）。 But B3 isn't just a symbol – it's a necessity. In the cold high-altitude cockpit, pilots need heavy leather and sheepskin to keep warm.
If the bomber jacket was inherently a symbol of heroism — aggressive old-fashioned masculinity — most feature films of the era supported that view. Dana Andrews played a veteran suffering from combat fatigue in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as Gregory Pike did in the Air Force-themed film Twelve O'Clock High (1949). Even during the filming of Howard Hawkes' romance Only Angels Have Wings (1939), during filming at a military base in front of a station in South America, Cary Grant put on a bomber jacket to show that he was an almost morbid risk-bearer as the commander of the airlift company. Women like Virginia Mayo (The Golden Age) or Jean Arthur (Angel Wings) can appreciate them, but few can understand the camaraderie and devotion of these men in military uniforms who face death every day.
Rafay Air Force jackets became popular among the U.S. military, and soon came under several official code names: the A-2 was a slimmer, lighter jacket that pioneered the use of zippers; while the G-1 was worn primarily by naval and army aviation. The modern version, developed around 1950, is a model for the high-street bomber jacket we see today. This casual jacket is more civilian, and more and more movie stars are wearing this casual jacket, and it is often the anti-heroic type. From Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) to Ryan Gosling in Drive (2011), the sleek design of the bomber jacket has lost much of its period-specific meaning. Instead, it became a symbol of anti-machismo, worn by those who played cool and occasionally immoral.
Today, wool bomber jackets still appear on the screen from time to time. Interestingly, though, it often appears in superhero movies. In The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Christopher Nolan dresses Bane (Tom Hardy) with a large sheepskin coat – designed by costume designer Lindy Hemming based on the remaining military jacket, hoping That Bane would look more like a "mercenary." Still, it's unusual to see an outright villain dressed like this — Nolan clearly deviates from the heroic tradition of the B3 jacket. But that tradition has been reinforced and recreated in Marvel's Captain America series, and we might expect some of the more beneficial behavior of a guy in a 40s-style bomber jacket.
No matter how you divide it, the heroic figures in our films — from Steve Rogers, the original name of "Captain America" in Marvel's Captain America series, to Indiana Jones — are still World War II heroes. More than 70 years later, this conflict is still ubiquitous on our movie screens. Even Star Wars has shown this effect, pitting insignificant Resistance fighters against the Nazi-style pervasive Evil Empire. No one can deny the resemblance of Han Solo to the adventurous fighter pilots of the past, wearing a modern leather bomber jacket. To DC and Marvel's Foo, a new generation of movie heroes are more inclined to use Lycra fibers and masks. You can ask any superhero and their answer will be consistent: uniforms matter. However, the older generation also has superhero costumes: bomber jackets.
| originally published in the May-June 2017 issue of Little White Lies magazine, P37
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A New York-born freelance writer who lives in Nottingham, England, has written about film and culture for magazines such as The Guardian, VICE, Grolsch Film Works, Canvas and Verité Film Magazine, and is a film curator at Watergate Cinematek in Nottingham, focusing on screening lesser-known treasures in Hollywood in the 1970s.
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