The Lion Has Wings

Released in 1939 as Britain was engaging Hitler's war machine, this B&W film cannot property be called a documentary. It is a dramatized propaganda film that masquerades as a fact-based call to arms.

The film portrays Britain as an idyllic land of goodwill and happy citizens. In contrast, Germany is portrayed by shots of Nazi soldiers spurred into action by Hitler's hateful histrionics. This is not a film of unbiased observation, obviously. It is the kind of cinema that inflames the emotions and plays on the heartstrings with stirring speeches of patriotism and images of ruddy-cheeked children and self-sacrificing lovers.

Be sure to read the "Goofs" section for this film as the film does contain inaccuracies. Accuracy was not the primary concern of its makers. They wished to motivate British viewers while assuring them that Britain is prepared, just, and in the right. I wonder if viewing the film was considered a patriotic duty at the time?

This film is well worth seeing for its historic footage and as an artifact of its time. Note that--like almost all who go to war--they underestimate the duration of impending hostilities. They forecast the war in Europe to be a 3-year struggle. This is partly due to an overestimation of British power. The film assures one that British resources are superior and British craftsmanship is second to none.

The narrator, who often sounds like a broadcaster at a football match, invokes various examples from British history to create an impression of invincibility. And the film quaintly promises that British resolve will overcome the "frightfulness".

In 1939, American cinema was enjoying its greatest year. In just two years, America would be dragged into the worldwide conflict and its cinematic resources would also produce propaganda that now looks quaint, biased, and sometimes shameful. "The Lion Has Wings" was paving the way for an unfortunate chapter in cinema that can be illuminating and interesting.

...from United Artists, producer Alexander Korda, and directors Michael Powell, Brian Desmond Hurst, & Adrian Brunel. After a short introduction on peacetime British life, the film gives a Cliff Notes breakdown on the lead-up to Great Britain's entry into WW2. Then there are two lengthy sections, one dealing with British RAF bombing runs over Germany, and the other detailing British defenses against German air raids. This is all interspersed with fictional vignettes meant to illustrate the effect on citizens' lives, with Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon as the "typical English couple". Also featuring June Duprez, Robert Douglas, Anthony Bushell, Brian Worth, Bernard Miles, Torin Thatcher, and Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth I.

This was hastily put together by Korda, with less than a month between the idea for the movie and it's release to cinemas. That speed shows in a jumbled, scattershot narrative, heavy on the patriotic rhetoric but light on any other aspect. The bits with Richardson and Oberon are the most useless, although their presence added to the movie's appeal at the time, I'm sure. Powell directed the bombing run section, and it seems like a trial run for his later One of Our Aircraft is Missing. The footage of Robson as Queen Elizabeth is lifted from Korda's Fire Over England.

The Korda brothers,although expatriate Hungarians, made some of the finest British films in the thirties and forties. They managed to create films that reflected the contemporary cultural ethos (including the imperialist ethos) that the country's political establishment wanted, and it comes as no surprise that their first film after the outbreak of the Second World War should be a patriotic morale booster. Indeed, this was the first film made in Britain about the conflict that had just started.

This film was made in a great hurry, and it shows. A large part of it consists of re-used peacetime newsreel film with a special commentary. This sounds pretty dire, but some of the cutting is interesting - contrasting a Nuremburg Rally with a race meeting, and Nazi speakers with Prince Monolulu (a well known tipster)yelling "I've got a horse."

Other parts are sections from different films. Scenes from 'Fire Over England' (with Flora Robson) compares the Nazi threat with the Spanish Armada. Other footage is from a pre-war instructional film about air raid precautions, in which a mock air raid takes place.

The actors are almost superfluous, and you wonder what they are doing there. One assumes that they were thrown in as a way of appealing to the ordinary cinema audience, who might otherwise have stayed away from a totally non-fiction film.

However, it is the aviation scenes that are the main attraction. Some of them are bizarre. At this stage, there was no footage of German aircraft available, so dog fights were recreated using shots of British aircraft (including some obsolete types), and a repeated shot of a Focke Wolf airliner (!) taking off. (At least it had German markings and looked like a bomber!).

The best shots were taken at an airfield housing a Spitfire squadron. Whilst there, the film crew accidently recorded the return of a group of bombers from a raid on warships near the Kiel Canal (the first R.A.F. raid of the war, and a major headline event at the time).

Two points. Although radar had already come into use, this could not be shown. Thus, the Spitfires are scrambled on the basis of information from a spy, corroborated by sound detectors and the naked eye. And, at one point, the German bombing force are foiled by a balloon barrage!

One can understand why Alexander Korda and his entourage interrupted their work on the marvellous fantasy film "Thief of Bagdad" to construct this patriotic, morale-boosting quickie, "The Lion Has Wings." It's somewhat amusing to see the lovely June Duprez still with her 'vulcan' pointed eyebrows (to make her look more exotic for her princess role in "Thief of Bagdad"). Ralph Richardson and several other officers from "The Four Feathers" are also on hand here, but in then-contemporary uniforms. This is not an 'art' film by any stretch, but it fulfills its purpose and is certainly of interest to anyone who has seen the other two films (aforementioned) as a minor footnote.

Made in the autumn of 1939, "The Lion Has Wings" was the first British propaganda film made after the outbreak of the Second World War. It was made in a documentary rather than a narrative style, and consists of three "chapters" with a linking story revolving around a senior RAF officer and his family. It opens with a section comparing the relaxed- easygoing lifestyle of the British people with the goose-stepping militarism of Nazi Germany, which gives the impression that the citizens of the Third Reich spent their entire lives taking part in one military parade or Nuremberg Rally after another. The second chapter recreates an actual bombing raid on German warships in the Kiel Canal and the third shows how an attack by Luftwaffe bombers is repelled by the RAF. There are also scenes inserted from an earlier film, "Fire Over England", about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The implication, of course, is that the Nazis will be defeated, just as the Spaniards were.

Propaganda documentaries like this one may be of historic interest in the light they shed on social attitudes at the time. From a modern perspective we can see that some of the preoccupations of democracies in the thirties were not as different from those of the dictatorships as people liked to believe at the time. Some of the scenes in the film's opening section- idyllic countryside, healthy young men exercising or taking part in sport, happy children playing outside new social housing complexes provided by a benevolent government- would not have seemed out of place in a German propaganda film. Although presumably the Germans would have had to find local equivalents for such things as oasthouses and rugby matches, and it is difficult to imagine Hitler playing "Neath the Spreading Chestnut Tree" as King George VI does here.

Perhaps what most strikes a modern audience about the film is its tone of smug patriotic confidence, a confidence that was to be sorely tested in the next few months after it was made. The assumption that the British Army was at least the equal of the Wehrmacht was one that did not hold up well during the disasters of 1940. Rather surprisingly, the film makes absolutely no reference to our French allies. Perhaps that is just as well. If it had done so, it would no doubt have reassured viewers that the French Army was an invincible war machine and the Maginot Line an impregnable fortification. The assurance that the RAF, unlike the Nazis, would only bomb military, not civilian, targets must have looked very hollow several years on, especially after the destruction of cities like Dresden.

One thing the film did get right was the importance of air power in the coming war, and in this context at least its assurances were to be proved correct when the RAF did indeed defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, although preventing night-time bombing raids was to prove more difficult than is shown here. The documentary scenes of the war in the air, however, are full of errors, largely because these were put together using newsreel footage and at this stage of the war no such footage existed of German military equipment. Thus a German "bomber" is actually a civilian airliner, and the image has been reversed, which means that its tailfin bears an anti-clockwise swastika, a symbol never used by the Nazis, who always used the clockwise version. Many of the British aircraft shown are biplane fighters, which were already obsolete by 1939. If you look carefully you will notice that one of the "German" ships bombed by the RAF is actually flying the White Ensign!

My DVD of the film was one given away in a newspaper promotion as part of a series of "Great British War Films". The series did indeed include some great films, such as "Went the Day Well?", "The Dam Busters", "Forty-Ninth Parallel" and "Ice Cold in Alex", but I cannot really see that "The Lion Has Wings" merits inclusion in such distinguished company. Propaganda documentaries, especially when seen seventy years after the events they describe, are rarely as entertaining as fictional narratives. This film may have played its part in keeping up morale during the "Phoney War", but today it is of interest to historians only. 5/10