The Secret War of Jackie's Girls (1980 TV Movie) User Reviews (6)

Compelling

[justinbennet · 5 December 2003]

Fantastic. I came across this gem trawling through the English terrestrial channels and was rewarded by ( channel )Five in time honoured style. The story of a crack team of flying nurses in WW2 ( Each with disparate and colourful personality traits: one's a tomboy, one's a goldigger, one has non specific fatal disease etc And what fantastic property this would make for Quentin Tarantino! )the eponymous Jackie dies fairly early in the film consolidating the group behind Casey, a beautiful woman with a fatal flaw:she cant smile. This is never mentioned in the script but becomes horribly evident as she flirts woodenly with a disollute Ryan O Neale lookalike, grimacing like a ventriloquists dummy throughout.

Theres a surprising amount of helicopter flying around a surprisingly dusty, mountainous and ravine strewn English landscape and an almost unbelievable amount of time spent in a subterraneean London pub. I would estimate fully a third of the film is spent braying Cole Porter songs distractedly around a battered upright. The pub is the heart of the film and is populated only by ex pat Americans and French counts. It is staffed solely by a blousy Dickensian Cockney Sparrah who scat sings ( in both senses of the word ) music hall tunes whilst handing out apparantly gratis treble whiskies.

You WILL want to watch this. You will be disappointed. It looks like an illadvised pilot episode padded out with excess M*A*S*H title footage. And frankly I love that. I live in London. What are the alternatives.

Goofs aplenty

[malcolmgsw · 1/10 · 21 November 2005]

As the other entries state there are plenty of errors in this film.To summarise the ones that i noticed:- 1.Neither the south of england or the north of France has any mountains 2.There were no female pilots in combat in the RAF. 3.Helicopters were not in service in the RAF at that time. 4.SOE not MI6 dealt with agents and the underground in France 5No air raid siren ever sounds. 6With bombs raining all around no one decides to go to an air raid shelter. 7One of the RAF pilots says he was a "Streetcar Conductor" when they are known in the UK as "Bus Conducters". 8At the end the German planes have camouflage suitable for desert action. 9None of the hairdos has any remote similarity to what would have been worn at that time.After all a WAAF with a buffoons hairdo I would say that this was entertainingly bad.

Laughable Nonsense

[website-10 · 1/10 · 24 August 2006]

Where do I start? A film set in wartime Britain yet the action is based around a US pastiche mansion with cliché suit of armour in the hallway and Britain and continental Europe look exactly like a hydro-electric riddled Rocky Mountains. All except the most minor characters seem of US origin so giving the impression that the US won the war single-handed. Moreover, the minor players are incapable of mustering a decent British accent between them. To compound this jarring impression the story is clearly told from a naive historical perspective with, for example, Britain being described as the last free country left in Europe! Mix in the anachronistic nonsense of an all woman squadron flying helicopters in the early 1940s and you have the perfect US feminist escapist fantasy circa 1980s.

Love that movie

[pittnz · 10/10 · 10 January 2020]

Please add Netflix and Prime Video. I want to see that movie. Thank you

Interesting idea but....

[rabishopp · 5 December 2003]

Spoilers ahead...

There's no denying the idea was good and the ladies look positively lovely. However, this film is clearly intended to be a pilot (no pun intended) for a TV series, perhaps a WWII version of Charlie' Angels.

While set in England, the film was quite clearly made in California. The house the heroines live in is not typical of a British country house. The leader of the group, points to a map of England and says, "We're here", pointing clearly to somewhere north of Birmingham. Later on, during a bombing raid, the girls say, "oh, Portsmouth is getting it again" or something similar. Being based somewhere like Derby, how would they know!! The use of stock footage is rather surprising, particularly from the classic movie/documentary, "The Battle of Britain" and others.

All that said, the chopper flying sequences are quite good. And there's some reasonable excitement with machine guns, grenades and fights with the evil Nazis.

Helicopter OSS operative all female during WW2

[redsounder · 26 August 2001]

This made for tv film was about a group that was similar to the allied DUSTERS in vietnam. The plot was about a OSS commando unit flying experimental helicopters circa 1943. Mariette hartley plays JACKIE in this film about women braving the odds under fire during the war against Hitler in europe. A great tv movie for the time the film mixed vintage clothes along with a original story some say was anchored in some truth. I had watched this film several times during it's network runs and always admired hartley as a boy, and her acting. i also liked the premise of women as butt kickers instead of helpless pawns. A great movie that even the ERA/NOW groups would love. Currently unavailable on video.