Otherwise known as the stupid, abbreviated version of this post, because I am simply not brain-present enough for the good one:
In an ideal world, I would have been able to watch One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) almost exactly three years ago, when I taped my copy of 49th Parallel (1941) off TCM, because the two films really are opposing sides of the same movie: different sympathies of anabasis. In the first, we had six Nazis trying to make their way across Allied Canada to the then-neutral U.S. after their U-boat was sunk in Hudson Bay. Here we get an abandoned bomber crashing in flames and the ominously routine announcement of the title—the six crew of "B for Bertie" have been forced to bail out over occupied Holland and we will follow them as they attempt to get back to England, aided by the Dutch resistance and hindered by the usual impedimenta of wartime, like bad luck and bullets. Cue a lot of patriotism, although not necessarily the kind the viewer might expect.
This was Powell and Pressburger's third collaboration1 and their first production together as the Archers, but it still doesn't quite feel like them—that came in the next year with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and I would argue reached apotheosis with A Canterbury Tale (1944), a film I cannot imagine having been made by anyone else ever in the history of time. There's nothing so outré about One of Our Aircraft Is Missing that you cannot envision the story in the hands of another writer or director, although I doubt Hitchcock or Noël Coward would have thought to make the most proactive and effective figures in the resistance both female.2 The film's weaknesses are much the same as its predecessor's, mostly the installment-style structure in which each episode is tightly scripted when taken by itself, but nothing ties them all together except the forward flow of time; therefore its strengths are similarly in the characterization, from the gradual differentiation of the British airmen (they are introduced by function, but we begin to learn them as people as time goes on) to the little indelible turns like Robert Helpmann's elegant, spineless quisling or Peter Ustinov's screen debut as a very young, rawboned Dutch priest. Powell himself appears in a small in-joke of a cameo as the airfield despatcher, ordering everybody about. There is no extra-diegetic music. The Germans are seen mostly in shadows or reflections, a presence on the land rather than faces to be vilified. (One Dutch character dispassionately judges them to be "an unhappy people.") And there is the land itself, which is more than politics; see the title of this post. The true heroes of the story are not the downed airmen, but the strangers on the ground who rescue them. The film opens with a dedication to five real-life Dutch citizens who were shot by the Germans for assisting the escape of a British aircrew in precisely this fashion. The last image onscreen is a bilingual promise that the Netherlands will rise again! Just as 49th Parallel broke up the block-print Nazi menace into individuals with mixed motives of their own, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing—while still waving the flag for Britain—reminds the viewer that occupied countries are not all surrender and collaboration. Eventually we'll get Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff and stories of wartime where nothing explodes onscreen at all. But mostly the Archers are felt in touches around the edges of this film, keeping away from the obvious plot twists,3 presenting the action like a documentary except when they feel like undercutting it with metafiction,4 making the story just strange enough that it holds up where similar films of the same genre have fallen into cardboard. But it's not as strange as it might be, and I suppose that's finally what I judge artists I like by. Still worth staring at for a couple of hours, though.
On a note so specific it may not be of interest to anyone but me, I think Eric Portman is using his own accent in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. He was born in Halifax; that's where B for Bertie's co-pilot Tom Earnshaw hails from. He's instantly, vocally recognizable, but he has less of an edge on his voice when he's not speaking RP. Go know. I'm going to sleep.
1. I am not counting Powell's The Spy in Black (1939), as they did not develop that film in partnership; Pressburger was brought in to fix the script, which he seems to have done impressively. I have yet to see it and Contraband (1940), which I really have no excuse for. I really like Conrad Veidt.
2. Pamela Brown is the schoolteacher Else Meertens, who never trusts anyone's story until she's been able to triple-check it herself; Googie Withers is Jo de Vries, who runs an underground to England under cover of Nazi sympathies. I was going to make this crack about David Lean, except he was the film's editor, so that doesn't seem quite fair. Ronald Neame did the cinematography. I figure I don't recognize the name of the art director only because I don't pay attention to that sort of thing. David Rawnsley?
3. The example that comes first to mind is the navigator, Frank (Hugh Williams). In peacetime, he's an actor; and being the venturesome type, he takes the necessity of disguise as an excuse for "a series of perfect Dutch sketches," one of which includes drag. And no one hits on him. He doesn't get dramatically unmasked. He keeps his mouth shut, because he's not a tenor (and his Dutch is kind of terrible), and makes a perfectly credible woman, you wouldn't look at her twice. Next up, he's going to be a clergyman. In the same way, everyone worries when the radio operator Bob (Emrys Jones) is separated from the rest of the crew, because he's a professional footballer who's never been out of England except in a Vickers Wellington, doesn't speak a word of Dutch, and "his brains are in his feet" . . . He's discovered a few towns over, playing cheerfully for the local team: football's a language everyone speaks. I appreciate this kind of restraint.
4. Most notably in the post-credits sequence, which we are told we get only because the "Actors" and "Technicians" clamored to know "what happened to B crew." Something of this same attitude will produce, next year, a deconstructive, deeply human biopic of a satirical cartoon character that opens with a medieval tapestry.
In an ideal world, I would have been able to watch One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) almost exactly three years ago, when I taped my copy of 49th Parallel (1941) off TCM, because the two films really are opposing sides of the same movie: different sympathies of anabasis. In the first, we had six Nazis trying to make their way across Allied Canada to the then-neutral U.S. after their U-boat was sunk in Hudson Bay. Here we get an abandoned bomber crashing in flames and the ominously routine announcement of the title—the six crew of "B for Bertie" have been forced to bail out over occupied Holland and we will follow them as they attempt to get back to England, aided by the Dutch resistance and hindered by the usual impedimenta of wartime, like bad luck and bullets. Cue a lot of patriotism, although not necessarily the kind the viewer might expect.
This was Powell and Pressburger's third collaboration1 and their first production together as the Archers, but it still doesn't quite feel like them—that came in the next year with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and I would argue reached apotheosis with A Canterbury Tale (1944), a film I cannot imagine having been made by anyone else ever in the history of time. There's nothing so outré about One of Our Aircraft Is Missing that you cannot envision the story in the hands of another writer or director, although I doubt Hitchcock or Noël Coward would have thought to make the most proactive and effective figures in the resistance both female.2 The film's weaknesses are much the same as its predecessor's, mostly the installment-style structure in which each episode is tightly scripted when taken by itself, but nothing ties them all together except the forward flow of time; therefore its strengths are similarly in the characterization, from the gradual differentiation of the British airmen (they are introduced by function, but we begin to learn them as people as time goes on) to the little indelible turns like Robert Helpmann's elegant, spineless quisling or Peter Ustinov's screen debut as a very young, rawboned Dutch priest. Powell himself appears in a small in-joke of a cameo as the airfield despatcher, ordering everybody about. There is no extra-diegetic music. The Germans are seen mostly in shadows or reflections, a presence on the land rather than faces to be vilified. (One Dutch character dispassionately judges them to be "an unhappy people.") And there is the land itself, which is more than politics; see the title of this post. The true heroes of the story are not the downed airmen, but the strangers on the ground who rescue them. The film opens with a dedication to five real-life Dutch citizens who were shot by the Germans for assisting the escape of a British aircrew in precisely this fashion. The last image onscreen is a bilingual promise that the Netherlands will rise again! Just as 49th Parallel broke up the block-print Nazi menace into individuals with mixed motives of their own, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing—while still waving the flag for Britain—reminds the viewer that occupied countries are not all surrender and collaboration. Eventually we'll get Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff and stories of wartime where nothing explodes onscreen at all. But mostly the Archers are felt in touches around the edges of this film, keeping away from the obvious plot twists,3 presenting the action like a documentary except when they feel like undercutting it with metafiction,4 making the story just strange enough that it holds up where similar films of the same genre have fallen into cardboard. But it's not as strange as it might be, and I suppose that's finally what I judge artists I like by. Still worth staring at for a couple of hours, though.
On a note so specific it may not be of interest to anyone but me, I think Eric Portman is using his own accent in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. He was born in Halifax; that's where B for Bertie's co-pilot Tom Earnshaw hails from. He's instantly, vocally recognizable, but he has less of an edge on his voice when he's not speaking RP. Go know. I'm going to sleep.
1. I am not counting Powell's The Spy in Black (1939), as they did not develop that film in partnership; Pressburger was brought in to fix the script, which he seems to have done impressively. I have yet to see it and Contraband (1940), which I really have no excuse for. I really like Conrad Veidt.
2. Pamela Brown is the schoolteacher Else Meertens, who never trusts anyone's story until she's been able to triple-check it herself; Googie Withers is Jo de Vries, who runs an underground to England under cover of Nazi sympathies. I was going to make this crack about David Lean, except he was the film's editor, so that doesn't seem quite fair. Ronald Neame did the cinematography. I figure I don't recognize the name of the art director only because I don't pay attention to that sort of thing. David Rawnsley?
3. The example that comes first to mind is the navigator, Frank (Hugh Williams). In peacetime, he's an actor; and being the venturesome type, he takes the necessity of disguise as an excuse for "a series of perfect Dutch sketches," one of which includes drag. And no one hits on him. He doesn't get dramatically unmasked. He keeps his mouth shut, because he's not a tenor (and his Dutch is kind of terrible), and makes a perfectly credible woman, you wouldn't look at her twice. Next up, he's going to be a clergyman. In the same way, everyone worries when the radio operator Bob (Emrys Jones) is separated from the rest of the crew, because he's a professional footballer who's never been out of England except in a Vickers Wellington, doesn't speak a word of Dutch, and "his brains are in his feet" . . . He's discovered a few towns over, playing cheerfully for the local team: football's a language everyone speaks. I appreciate this kind of restraint.
4. Most notably in the post-credits sequence, which we are told we get only because the "Actors" and "Technicians" clamored to know "what happened to B crew." Something of this same attitude will produce, next year, a deconstructive, deeply human biopic of a satirical cartoon character that opens with a medieval tapestry.
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