Above and Beyond

A very nice little show, I've only seen part I also, and am looking forward to part 2.. I am not a WWII buff, so I don't know of the accuracy of all the situations. But as a good Canadian movie I thought it was great! I thought the actors did a good job in portraying the era. The main characters had good interaction between each other. I liked the plot including a small town NFLD, playing a major role, I would like to see how real/accurate this movie was. (As the person above noted many mistakes.) I noticed they have some online information about the what really happened and real pictures and comments. Even some help for teachers. Overall I enjoyed it and am eagerly looking forward to watching part II :)

This film is about a major event during World War II for which no previous movies had been made. "Above and Beyond" is based on a true story. The writers, John W. Doyle and Lisa Porter tell the story as it might have happened behind the scenes with the major characters in the British war effort. The young actors have most of the lead roles in the film. They form the romantic vehicle for the story. Those fictional roles are all fine, but none exceptional. On the other hand, the casting of the real characters in history is superb. And, the portrayals of Winston Churchill, Don Bennett, Lord Beaverton, Archibald Sinclair, and Dr. Sir Frederick Banting are wonderful.

A movie based on a historical event, especially about World War II, arouses the history buff in me. So, some reading and researching led me to find out more interesting details about the story and the key players in history who appear in the film. Perhaps other movie buffs will enjoy this as well.

Construction of Gander International Airport began in 1936. In the movie, Capt. Don Bennett (played excellently by Richard E. Grant) says about Gander, "Largest slab of tarmac in the world. Built for the trans- Atlantic passenger service. Rather ahead of its time." To which Lord Beaverbrook (played excellently by Kenneth Welsh) replies, "I do believe its time has come." So, it became the base for the Atlantic Ferry service. Today it is a civilian airport with a Canadian Air Force base sharing the airfield. It is home to air/marine search and rescue that covers a large area of the Western Atlantic.

Don Bennett was a native Australian and famous aviator who set flight records in the 1930s. He was the first superintendent of the Atlantic Ferry service which he helped set up as a private operation. As in the movie, he led the first flight of seven Hudson aircraft that crossed the North Atlantic on Nov. 10, 1940. Bennett was a stern man, whom many British leaders found arrogant and abrasive. But aviators held him in high esteem. His 1935 book, "The Complete Air Navigator" was the essential textbook on the subject for more than 30 years. In the summer of 1941, the service was reorganized as the Atlantic Ferry Organization (AFTERO) within the RAF. Bennet left and went on to a distinguished war record, rising to the rank of Air Vice-Marshal. He later became CEO of British South American Airways. He was the only senior RAF officer from the war who wasn't knighted. Bennett never drank, smoked or was heard to curse or swear. Scenes in the movie show him drinking a whiskey and a gin and tonic with Lord Beaverbrook, but he never drank.

Lord Beaverbrook was a Canadian, born William Maxwell "Max" Aitken. He grew up in New Brunswick and by age 30 was a millionaire. He became a business tycoon, newspaper publisher and politician. He moved to England at age 30 in 1908, and expanded his businesses. He won a seat in the House of Commons in 1910. He was highly regarded as an organizer. Winston Churchill was a political friend who persuaded him to serve as Minister of Aircraft Production. Numerous books relate the great service Beaverbrook performed for England. He later renounced his British citizenship and returned to Canada, where he was a major philanthropist until his death in 1964 at age 85. Many of his charities and philanthropies exist today.

Peter Messaline plays Archibald Sinclair and bears an uncanny physical resemblance to him. Sinclair is a frequent antagonist to Lord Beaverbrook. He was the head of the Liberal party, which then held only 20 seats in Parliament. But, he had been a friend of Winston Churchill since serving under him during WW I. With WW II underway, Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940 and established an all-party cabinet to involve all political parties in the leadership of the war effort. He asked Sinclair to head the air ministry. After the war, Sinclair's fortunes mostly faded, but he was elevated to the House of Lords in the last years of his life.

Dr. Sir Frederick Banting was a Canadian and co-discoverer of insulin. He won the Nobel Prize for medicine/physiology in 1923 at age 32. He is the youngest person ever to have received the Nobel Prize in his field. Many institutions of learning and research in Canada today bear his name. Jason Priestly plays him splendidly in the movie. As the film shows, he hitched a ride from Gander to England on Friday, Feb. 21, 1941, and died when his plane crashed not long after takeoff. The movie doesn't give any more details. But the news accounts of the event tell what happened. Captain Joseph Mackey was the pilot and radioed that an engine had failed. They were going to return to Gander and the radio went silent in the movie.

The plane crashed in the bush just 10 miles from Musgrave Harbor, a fishing village located in the far northeast of Newfoundland just 60 miles from Gander. There were no roads into the area until 1956. Local residents later told of hearing a plane flying very low the day of the crash. But they didn't know about the crash until they heard a radio news broadcast Saturday evening that said a plane had crashed in the Newfoundland wilds with a famous doctor on board. Villagers on snowshoes found the wreck site five days after the crash and carried the men out on sleighs. Captain Mackey was the only survivor. Banting died from injuries and exposure.

Joss Auckland plays the unshakable Winston Churchill perfectly. Nothing more needs to be said about the great politician, author and orator who truly is one of the great men of the 20th century.

Here is a television mini-series that one wills to be good, but all the wishful thinking in the world can't forgive its flaws. On the plus side, the setting is authentic in terms of greater geographic area and the cast does fairly well despite a sophomoric and uninspired script. Poor Joss Akland does his best although he is badly miscast as Winston Churchill. On the minus side, the film's budget was too low to allow the story to be well told or the period convincingly evoked. There are simply too many historical inaccuracies, too few of the right types of airplanes (and many that are inappropriate), and too much reliance on amateurish and unconvincing computer-generated aerial sequences that serve only to squander credibility. Sadly, the more one knows of history, the less forgivable these failings become.

I should perhaps reserve judgment because I did not see more than a third of Above and Beyond. I turned it off (something I rarely do with aviation films) in utter disgust after a Lockheed Hudson makes a crash landing due to an engine fire. The orchestration of this emergency and its cheesy digital realization were so ludicrously inept that the producers should have fired their technical adviser on the spot. That is, if they even had one. I suspect they didn't because the interior mock-up of the Hudson cockpit entirely lacked a pilot's side window. Hello! All in all, this mini-series was a promising concept that ended up doing a disservice to those who actually organized and performed those transatlantic ferry flights early in World War II. Here was an opportunity -- unfortunately missed -- to make up for Captains of the Clouds, the 1942 Jimmy Cagney film that likewise ends with an unconvincing depiction of Hudsons being ferried from Canada to the United Kingdom.

I saw this movie last night and I was surprised that it was actually pretty good, but thats only after seeing part 1. Truthfully the only reason I started watching it was because some of it was filmed here in Gander, NL, and some of my friends were extras and I thought it would be funny/cool to see them on TV, but once I started watching it I found it pretty interesting. I, personally, haven't learned a lot about WW2 yet so I can't critique on whether it was accurate or not but I enjoyed it and it was a good story. I'm also glad that one of the lead female parts was played by somebody that wasn't tall, thin and pretty. All 'n all, as I said, I thought it was pretty good. I would have given it a 6 but since it was partially shot in my hometown, I gave it a 7.

This is written after viewing part I. I may not bother with part II. The story is a good one, the creation of Ferry Command in the early, dark years of World War II. But the production is sloppy and melodramatic, peopled with cardboard stereotypes right out of the Hardy Boys and hopelessly contrived situations. The special effects look as though they were done with a Commodorte 64 and there is a huge list of factual errors. For example, BOAC was not formed until after the war. In 1940 it was known as Imperial Airways. There was no such thing as CP Air in 1940. (Canadian Pacific Airlines at that time was a very small regional operation in British Columbia.) The supposedly Montreal homes are obviously in Toronto. Some props (radio equipment, fire extinguishers, thermos bottles, airport tractors and hangars) were blatantly of post war vintage. The portrayals of Churchill and Beaverbrook are reasonably good. The rest is an unfortunate joke. PS/I STAND CORRECTED. BOAC WAS FORMED IN 1940