YMMV / Ace of Aces

• Awesome Music:
  • The beautiful main theme.
  • The Olympic Torch Relay theme. So grandiose that Vladimir Cosma reused the first part as Julius Caesar's conquest theme in Asterix in Britain.
  • Ever thought about blending klezmer music and Bavarian brass music? Vladimir Cosma did it.
• Critic-Proof: The film was very successful at the box office upon release in France in 1982 (second in total for the year, behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial). A very acclaimed film, Jacques Demy's A Room in Town (Une Chambre en Ville), came out at the same time and flopped. 23 critics gathered to publish an article in Telerama magazine in which they panned Ace of Aces, accusing it of being "engineered for success" and of "stealing tickets" to A Room in Town. Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was absolutely no stranger to auteur drama films (having gained fame with the French New Wave) answered to them that he didn't accuse James Bond of stealing his movie tickets when Stavisky underperformed against The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Among the books Jo shows to the officer of The Gestapo while the bookshop is being ransacked, there's Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Marie-France Pisier played Claudia Chauchat in a film adaptation of that book, released earlier the same year.
• Retroactive Recognition: French singer Florent Pagny as one of the boxing athletes trained by Jo. He hadn't reached fame yet (the song that shot him to fame, "N'importe quoi", was released in 1987).

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