Dive Bomber (1941) was released a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor; the film was well received by audiences, being ranked as the sixth most popular film of that year. No other pre-Pearl Harbor picture matched the quality of its flight scenes. Film columnist Louella Parsons wrote, "Dive Bomber again makes us glad to be Americans protected by a Navy as competent as our own."
Filming at the active naval base in San Diego required great care, especially for the aerial sequences. Curtiz shot every foot of Dive Bomber with Navy assistance and under strict Navy scrutiny. To create singapore email list realistic shots, he mounted cameras on Navy planes to achieve “amazing point-of-view shots,” taking viewers inside the cockpit during flight. He also mounted cameras under the wings of planes to dramatize takeoffs from the Enterprise, an aircraft carrier launched a few years earlier. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave it a good review:
The Warners have photographed this picture in one of the most magnificent technical colors ever seen… masses of brilliantly colored aircraft, ranked in impressive rows around an air base or on the huge flight decks of aircraft carriers, and roaring in silvery majesty, wing by wing, across the boundless skies of the West Coast. Never before has an aviation film been so vivid in its imagery, conveyed a sense of tangible solidity when it shows us solid things, or been so full of sunlight and clean air when the cameras are in the air. Except for a few poorly matched shots, the work is nearly perfect.
