Laurence Olivier is the glamorous test pilot and Valerie Hobson an undercover reporter in this deft little espionage number about industrial sabotage and kidnapping at sea of aircraft & crew by some unnamed foreign power. It seems a series of planes have vanished mid-flight from the skies, brought down (we soon learn) by a newfangled ray gun aboard a Top-Secret spy ship disguised as a salvage freighter. Some enemy country hoping to get their hands on a new experimental British-made super engine. And Olivier up for the next flight! Proto-James Bond material, not quite good enough to pass (the villains woefully underdeveloped), but given class treatment by a bunch of Alex Korda regulars (director Tim Whelan; lensers Harry Stradling & Jack Clayton; art director Vincent Korda), though not an official Korda production. What really makes this worth a look is Ralph Richardson as a Secret Service man, a spy-of-all-trades type. He’s a constant delight, as if tackling both ‘M’ and Agent 007 in some future James Bond film. (Why there’s even an Ian Fleming in the cast . . . just not that Ian Fleming.) Best in the first two acts (Richardson in clover, racing around to cover all bases), the film turns a bit messy in an action-packed third act, director Whelan not quite up to all the hand-to-hand combat during a shipboard takeover. While elsewhere, the bickering romantic banter for Hobson & Olivier is boilerplate stuff. Still, good breezy fun much of the way.
DOUBLE-BILL: More (and better) proto-Bondian wartime adventure in THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU/’43 with Robert Donat (and Valerie Hobson, again) as a bomb defuser turned spy.
LINK: Good Public Domain print here: https://archive.org/details/qplanes
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