Le lion a des ailes

This is by no means a good movie but it does have substantial curiosity value being the first British movie to be wholly completed after the start of the Second World War .It was completed in 5 weeks and released to cinemas in November 1939 . Costing just £ 30,000 it was financed by its producer ,the renowned Alexander Korda , cashing in his life insurance policy and is a flag waving slice of patriotism aimed at stiffening British resolve in the early days of the war .It was shot in 12 days and is a curious hybrid of a picture .

It opens with an illustrated lecture ,delivered by the newsreel commentator ,E V H Emmett charting the rise of Nazism and contrasting the militaristic stance of Germany with the more sporting and pacifist pursuits of the British .This is simple stuff but true -and those morons carping at action in Iraq would be well advised to study this period of history to learn (always assuming their blinkered minds are capable of learning ) what appeasement leads to .

It makes copious use of footage from the Elizabethan themed Fire Over England ,with Flora Robson as Queen Bess rallying the troops before they sailed out to deal with the Spanish Armada . Its main theme is the contrast between militarism and the virtues it deems England stands for -virtues articulated by Merle Oberon in a scene with Ralph Richardson " We must keep our land ,darling ..we must keep our freedom .We must fight for the things we believe in ...Truth and Beauty ..and Kindness "

One especially compelling piece of documentary footage contrasts the bombastic Nuremeberg rallies with shots of the shy and diffident King George at a Boy Scout rally singing "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree"

The staged scenes of the attack on the Kiel canal are a bit phoney but overall the movie does a neat job of pointing out the contrast between militarism and democracy

The emphasis is too socially restricted with scenes of English life being confined to suburbia and the landed gentry but as a social document this has value .As a movie drama it is negligible

Michael Powell was in the middle of production of The Thief of Bagdad when war broke out between England and Germany upon Hitler's invasion of Poland. Falling back on an agreement with the government, producer Alexander Korda gave whatever resources he could to the British government to help the war effort and moved the production to Hollywood. That left Powell in England to make this, The Lion Has Wings, a propaganda piece of which he made, maybe, 15% of the final product. The rest is made up of footage shot by Brian Hurst, Adrian Brunel, and Korda himself mixed with a large dose of footage acquired from the British government and newsreels. The final product is a quick and dirty little bit of "pick me up" for the masses in the earliest days of the war. It would be interesting to match this up with John Boorman's Hope and Glory as well as William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver to get overlapping looks at the start of the global conflict from the British homefront perspective.

Anyway, the first half hour is essentially one long newsreel, describing the differences in culture between Britain (peace-loving, congenial, almost classless, and free-wheeling) and that of Germany (autocratic, stiff, warlike), leading up to Hitler's provocations across the European continent that led to the Polish invasion, and finally a look at British Spitfire and bomber production. Occasionally, we get glimpses of Wing Commander Richardson (Ralph Richardson) and his wife (Merle Oberon) as he goes off to help at central air command and prepare for the first of Germany's air raids against the British mainland.

The footage shot by each director is reportedly this: Hurst directed everything with Richardson, Powell directed everything in planes, and Brunel shot the crisis section (though, I'm not entirely sure what that is). There's footage from Triumph of the Will as well as a segment from the film Fire Over England showing Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson) giving speeches in her armor in the face of the Spanish Armada, drawing a parallel between the British responses then and contemporaneously. It seems a bit hoary, but I think it kind of works.

And that's largely my response to it all: it's a bit hoary, but it kind of works. It's unabashedly propaganda to the point where the only way to make it moreso would be to have the narrator (E. V. H. Emmett) outright call it so. However, it's actually got something like a dramatic structure. The scenes are mostly decently well done. The stuff with Richardson ranges from obvious (everything with his wife) to borderline ridiculous (the entire section dealing with the three German bombing runs, including a command center that makes no sense). However, it's Powell's stuff in the planes that works the best. They're about professional men doing a professional job in a dangerous environment (it's almost Hawksian), but there's no time for bits of personal story from any of them. It's just down and dirty men on a mission stuff.

And, because this is propaganda, the British win everything. I mean, everything. The British bombing run Kiel Canal goes off flawlessly, sinking a bunch of battleships without losing a single plane. The counterattack from Germany gets brushed away with the well-trained British pilots easily taking out the bombers, leaving no one on the ground to be hurt. In fact, the final scene is between Richardson and Oberon where Oberon, in nurse's dress, talks about how she has so little to do in her official capacity, a reality that would starkly change with the beginning of the German Blitz. It reminds me of how Hawks' own Air Force had to end with a great victory even if the story didn't call for it.

So, it's propaganda, but it's decent propaganda. The look at wartime production is interesting. The "story" beats are fine and function decently enough. The overview of how Britain is preparing defenses including explanations for barrage balloons is interesting and informative (the people of the nation should know why large inflatable blimps are hanging by steel cables from their major cities, for sure). I've seen far worse propaganda, but it's also obvious that the needs of propaganda and the needs for drama are pretty much completely diametrically opposed. They clash. It's possible to lessen the clash, but the clash will be there, nonetheless.

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

I really wasn't expecting to see a documentary when I saw the names Merle Oberon and Ralph Richardson, but a documentary it was. "The Lion Has Wings" is a propaganda film produced by Alexander Korda, showing the world as the Nazis begin to take over Europe.

If you know about England at this time in history, and I do, you perhaps won't be as interested in this as others.

The British really wanted to fight, but they were afraid that America wouldn't join them, and they really didn't know how they could stave off the Germans without the U.S.

Whether they could withstand the Germans or not, the Brits wanted to show that they were ready to fight.

Some interesting actual footage. Oberon and Richardson were just there to get people into the theaters. This is pretty dry stuff, although back then, a film of this type was important for morale.

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.