Ships with Wings (1942)

Movies made in the midst of WWII generally had some contribution to make to the war effort, even if this was a confusing mix of good old fashioned escapist entertainment and motivational propaganda. So when genuine documentary footage is added to the mix, the resulting movie could get pretty confusing - and this is certainly the case with this Ealing made wartime melodrama.

Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, two documentary film-makers, arrived at Ealing in 1941, and brought with them a greater realism than the studio's previous output.



In fact, one of the two brought with him a bag full of rushes filmed whilst doing service on the HMS Ark Royal. These were to become the 'real' core of this film whilst the film proper was deliberately woven around it. This was not uncommon practice of course. Many films have been created in this way and ITC made a virtual industry out of it using the same spectacular car chase footage and European city footage again and again across all the properties in their franchise.

So what's 'Ships with Wings' about then? The tale kicks off some two years before the war with a bunch of spiffing RAF officers sounding like they stepped straight out of a Harry Enfield or Armstrong and Miller sketch with their terribly clipped upper crust accents. Much of the dialogue is spoken in nice Mess quarters or in swanky night-clubs and restaurants. Three pilot friends, Stacey (Clements), Grant (Michael Wilding) and Maxwell (Michael Rennie) are competing for Celia Wetherby (Jane Baxter). Celia's brother is awfully and frightfully keen to become a pilot so sensing an opportunity to impress Celia, Stacey agrees to take her brother on a flight, despite protestations that the plane was unsafe. He is forced to make a crash landing and the brother is killed.



Utterly disgraced and thrown out of the RAF, Stacey resorts to getting flying work at a tiny civilian airline in Greece (No - not EasyJet) where he encounters a German spy and a co-pilot who is a Nazi sympathiser. But Stacey remains ever the faithful Brit and is soon in fisticuffs with the German. ("Get up, you filthy Hun, I want to hit you again"). Soon after, in true melodramatic style (remember - there were no TV soaps to satisfy the thirst for tragedy), his lover dies and he decides to rejoin his comrades in the war effort.



HMS Invincible (actually the Ark Royal) is deployed in the Greek territories and some of the better scenes in this overlong film (at 2HR 20mins) include the various attempts to take off and land on a damaged runway aboard the mighty vessel.

All war time movies had to get official approval from Government who were as keen as they could to ensure consistency of wartime message and apparently Churchill himself took issue with the film which seemed to suggest that the fate of the whole fleet rested on a single individual's self sacrifice. But he was persuaded not to ban it as it seemed to have some spirited and motivational value.



For lovers of related anecdotes, during shooting Ealing Studios Stage 2 was hit and badly damaged by German bombs though naturally this was not the sort of thing that would put a chap off his film-making.

If a little long, the film is nonetheless entertaining as a period piece. It all feels very stagey and earnest today, but there's something uplifting about the courage of a man committed to putting right the accidental death of one man and avenging the death of his lover. Which was stirring stuff indeed and no doubt helped viewers in their determination to succeed in the war effort.

The transfer here, in common with other Optimum Ealing releases of late, is very good with little sign of wear and tear and it delivers good, solid blacks throughout. It's presented in 4:3 but this is not far off its original Academy ratio so little lost of the picture there. Audio is mono but acceptable.