Aces High is about those daring young men in the First World War flying-machines who went up up up in the air and then .....

Well, when the action starts in this, a screen adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's anti-war play Journey's End, the average life expectancy of a young chap arriving in France fresh from flying-school was two weeks.

Amongst the pilots there's resignation, cynicism, sadness, whoring, drunkenness as a path to oblivion - all the usual stuff laid on with a trowel. It's just not very subtle, and it was done a whole lot better a couple of generations earlier in Dawn Patrol.

But while the movie is pretty cliched, the aerial shots of the First World War dogfights is pretty spectacular. It won BAFTA Awards at the time, and the quality is still remarkable. This is some of the best aerial war footage from this period you could hope to see -- it does redeem what is otherwise a pretty average movie.

Now, this is a pretty strange transfer.

The image quality is barely acceptable -- the anamorphic transfer has been taken from a print which appears pretty washed-out at times, with lots of flecks and other transient damage. But there's no damage quite bad enough to render it unviewable, and the two-channel mono sound is excellent -- clear and punchy.

However, the 97-minute running-time is a real problem. The Region 2 release in Britain runs for 104 minutes, and a key reference site for movies gives the movie a running time of 114 minutes.

So we've lost quite a bit of footage here. And that's not what we want from our DVDs.

There are no extra features of any kind.

I'd have to advise against purchase, based on the strange running-time issue.