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Desperate Journey is hardly among director Raoul Walsh's finest, or even his more important movies -- but it does illustrate precisely how important Walsh was to the Warner Bros. film making factory, and to Hollywood overall, and his basic worth as a director. True, with a good script and story, and a first-rate cast, he would work wonders, as with enduring classics such as High Sierra or The Roaring Twenties. Desperate Journey, with its improbability-laden script and story and stereotypical characters, was never going to be a classic, but in Walsh's hands the pacing and the performances are so brisk and breezy that we never have time to stop for breath, much less ponder the improbabilities we've seen -- and with the cast's strongest attributes brought to the fore, the result is a memorably enjoyable propaganda thriller with just the right mix of suspense, laughs, and patriotism; and even better for younger viewers, there's no time-out for romance, Nancy Coleman being the sole female character of any significance, and so serious a character that there's never a possibility of it, even with so handsome and debonaire a leading man as Errol Flynn (as well as a brash young Ronald Reagan) on hand. On a more serious critical level, the script needed work -- Raymond Massey's put-upon Luftwaffe major is, at times, incredibly stupid, as are (conveniently) virtually all of the Nazis with whom the heroes lock horns. Rather surprisingly, the script does go out of its way to mention the existence of anti-Nazi Germans, something that the British propaganda movies of the era, serving a population that had come under direct attack by the Germans, usually avoided. After Reagan became president in the 1980s, clips from Desperate Journey in which his character dons a German uniform turned up occasionally, shown very much out-of-context, courtesy of his detractors. Another factor also lost on modern viewers is precisely what a tonic this picture and those like it must have been in late 1942, especially on the American side of the Atlantic -- the US Eighth Air Force (then known officially as the VIII Bomber Command) had only begun regular bombings of German-held territory that summer, and with nothing like the numbers (or quality) of planes they would later muster; and the British, with their night bombings, were a long way from the thousand-bomber raids of late in the war, and far more prone to missing their targets than anyone wanted to admit. And here is a lone RAF plane depicted as nailing its target -- initially with the intention of doing so from high altitude . . . . Anyone with real knowledge of the air war (especially members of the US Army Air Forces and the RAF) must have winced and laughed to themselves, but audiences ate it up at home. And thanks to Walsh's pacing and the cast's boundless appeal, it's still a fun viewing experience.