Out of the Clouds

This is a fascinating ensemble piece, well directed by Basil Dearden, which creates a combination of personal dramas involving pilots, passengers, and airport personnel and shows how their stories cross and intermingle. Robert Beatty plays an ex-pilot who has become the head of operations at the airport, but hates being on the ground and longs to get back to his old job of flying over the Atlantic. But the doctor will not pass him. James Robertson Justice is an experienced pilot who repeatedly refuses to take off in a plane because he rightly says he hears something wrong with one of the four engines. Sid James has a bit part. There is a touching love story about two young people (played by David Knight and Margo Lorenz) who meet at the airport while waiting for their delayed planes to take off in opposite directions. The film works very well dramatically, but its chief interest today is the extraordinary portrait of Heathrow Airport as it was in the mid-1950s. In those days you could drive a car right onto the tarmac. Ah, those were the days, before everybody got up tight. Anyone interested in the history of commercial aviation needs to see this film, it is a 'must'. And it is very entertaining as well. It is not done in a semi-documentary style at all but is entirely done as a dramatic film which incorporates the details of the airport and shows how everything works.

At London Airport, a variety of staff and passengers pass each other, their various stories are told here – some intertwined some separate. Two passengers passing through meet briefly and develop a bond that seems due to be broken, an ex-pilot tries to pass his medical and get his wings back while another has to make a decision when faced with temptation.

Modern audiences will be very familiar with ensemble films that have several characters whose stories overlap around one theme (in this case the airport). However it doesn't really manage to pull this off to any great degree and it struggles to really paint an overall picture that engages. The main part of the plot is the romantic meeting between two passengers; this doesn't work for several reasons. Firstly, the plotting of it is strained and I never really bought into it. Secondly the performances from the two actors involved are so poor that the material can't survive past that.

The rest of the film has a few interesting strands with the pilots but again these don't really work out. Part of the reason for this is the film just not having enough time to really develop the characters into real characters, rather than just stories. The lack of character meant that I wasn't involved in the tale, rather just watching it. It is a shame because I haven't seen such a film from this period, even though I could name several from the past 10 years, but it just doesn't work out.

Overall it was a good try but the poor stories really draw a lot away from those that had potential. The film struggles more because the stories with potential are not supported or developed enough to be involving.

An amusing and quaint period piece with a couple of interesting parallels with life today (holocaust references and international drug smuggling). A good cast but the true stars are BOAC's Lockheed Super Constellation and the transatlantic Boeing Stratocruiser. Objects of beauty confined to museums these days.

Later dismissed by producer Michael Relph as "a real potboiler!" Now that Ealing Studios were releasing through Rank their product was becoming far more mainstream. So top billing goes to bland fifties heartthrob Anthony Steel, flanked by a romantic piano score by Richard Addinsell and a glossy depiction in colour of activity centred on Heathrow when air travel was considered incredibly glamorous.

Strongly anticipating 'The VIPs' a few years later (in which delays caused by fog also facilitated the various plot developments concerning its large cast). Harsher recent global events are however evoked by unusually making the two young lovers played by David Knight and Margo Lorenz Jewish; him on stopover to Israel, she left alone in the world having been orphaned by the Holocaust. (While the makers quietly remind us of life's seamier side by including a fleeting subplot about drug smuggling.)

After Ealing's 'Dead of Night', ensemble films-- sets of short stories linked by theme- caught on in Britain. And after 'Train of Events' (1949), Relph and Dearden had another bash with this pre-'Airport' (and pre-'Airplane!') compendium of tears, love and laughter set at London's Heathrow Airport. Michael Balcon eased the purse strings to permit shooting in Eastmancolour-- all those blue skies and silver speed birds-- but the cast, apart from Lorenz and the British-based American David Knight, is British Commonwealth (Robert Beattie, a Canadian, worked mainly over here) and the low-key tone is Anglo too.

'Out of the Clouds' can be seen as a continuation of the post-war 'victory against the odds' genre: uniforms, stiff upper lips, quasi-military routines with room for the odd romance or shared confidence between male pilots (officers) and subservient female stewardesses. During a sticky landing, the airport firemen standing by are shot from heroic low angles as if by Humphrey Jennings. Anthony Steel as a philandering, smuggling cockpit jockey is like the statutory bad apple in a POW camp.

But wartime memories feed into the film's inspiration in a less obvious manner. It reflects a brief surge of optimism about Britain leading the world in civil aviation.

Heathrow, though it looks like a desert here, has been operating for almost ten years. It is on its way to becoming the busiest crossroads of air travel, as well as the greatest noise pollution disaster in Europe. The central area already has its control tower and first purpose-built terminal-- a far cry from the tent city which hastily arose in 1945 after a cabal of civil servants and airline managers fooled Churchill into green lighting the forced appropriation of Middlesex's best farmland, on the pretext that the RAF needed a bigger field near London than Northolt. In the movie all the airliners are prop-driven; but De Havilland has just produced the first jet, the Comet, and its fatal metal-fatigue flaws are not yet understood.

Here on view is the half-forgotten period when passengers embarked so near the lounge that friends could wave them on board; when stewardesses, not Tannoys, addressed travellers courteously and by name; when security precautions were cursory; when BOAC and Pan Am embodied national pride; and, more fancifully, when a cabbie would give a foreign couple a tour of 'the real London' ending in his own home.

Interestingly the main plot concerns an Auschwitz survivor: very rare in film fiction 50 years ago. This Austrian orphan is diverted from marrying an elderly ex-GI in Wisconsin by meeting a young hydrologist who wants to make the desert bloom in the new Israel. Balcon seldom let his Jewishness show so clearly.

Britflick fans will enjoy plane-spotting faces such as James Robertson Justice, on the verge of Hollywood stardom in 'Land of the Pharoahs'; ever-fluttery, downtrodden Esma Cannon; Sid James, gambling on his wife's life with travel insurance; Terence Alexander, the future Charlie Hungerford of 'Bergerac', as a flight controller; Abraham Sofaer, celestial judge in 'A Matter of Life and Death', as a talkative Indian; and Bernard Lee, aka 'M', as a customs man with a nose for Steel's suitcase shenanigans.

Steel, as usual, projects suave unreliability, like a more reined-in Laurence Harvey. Twenty years later he would be outraging Corinne Cléry in 'Histoire d'O'.