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Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Q PLANES / CLOUDS OVER EUROPE (1939)

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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