Nuages sur l'Europe

You really can't go wrong with Ralph Richardson in a cast, and it holds true with "Clouds Over Europe," a 1939 film that also stars Laurence Olivier and Valerie Hobson.

It's pre-WW II, and Richardson plays a secret service man in England who is convinced that a series of missing planes from diverse places is no accident. He's convinced the planes are being sabotaged, but by whom, and why?

Olivier plays one of the pilots, and he's funny as well as handsome. Valerie Hobson is a reporter in an adversarial relationship with Olivier. She turns out to be related to someone else in the film.

But it's Richardson who steals the show with his eccentric portrayal of Major Charles Hammond, a man who always forgets his umbrella and returns for it. He helps to give this affair a lightheartedness that makes it enjoyable.

Recommended for its very good British cast.

Everyone involved with this brisk comedy/thriller seems to be enjoying themselves immensely. It's a ripping yarn about spies, disappearing planes and a secret ray gun, lit up by Olivier and Richardson, with lots of cheerful gags along the way. It's dated, of course, but if you can leave that aside it's still good fun.

When newly developed planes being disappearing during testing with no trace a police Inspector and a test pilot begin to look into the possibility of espionage within the company.

Wartime dramas are very much of a standard affair – feel good affairs where we beat the Germans. This is very much one of those – the story is very flimsy and unlikely but it manages to have plenty to commend it. The story is carry by the comedy and the characters that make you overlook the sheer unlikely way in which the planes vanish. The story progresses to the inevitable shootout between the Brits and the Germans but on the way there's plenty to enjoy.

The film is mainly saved by a wonderful performance by Ralph Richardson as the inspector – he is funny from the first scene and his character is wonderfully charming and forgetful. Olivier is also good, but it's not his best! The supporting cast of sassy women and foolish businessmen also add to the mix to make for an enjoyable romp.

Overall this isn't a classic but the comedy and a superb Richardson makes this better than the sum of it's parts.

Some 20 years before Ian Fleming started writing about these things, it's nice to know that the British Secret Service was on the job and apprehending spies and saboteurs even if they're a bit slow to catch on at times.

With a little inside help from the air plant, some Teutonic looking gentleman have perfected a ray that immobilizes airships and brings them down real nice on the ocean. No trace of about four warships has been found at all or their crews. It's of concern to test pilot Laurence Olivier, to British agent Ralph Richardson, and to news reporter Valerie Hobson.

Hobson and Richardson are brother and sister. As you can imagine his job involves secrecy and undercover work and Hobson's from the Lois Lane school of journalism. Family dinners must really be something in that family. She also falls for Olivier while she's undercover working as a waitress at a coffee shop near the plane factory.

Q Planes must have been seen as wildly fantastic by the 1939 audience, but two generations who saw Sean Connery and Roger Moore engage in even wilder derring-do than is shown in this film, would regard Q Planes as all in a day's work.

Olivier and Hobson are fine, but Richardson steals the film whenever he's on screen. Q Planes will never be ranked as in the top 10 of any of these players, but it's a nice breezy espionage comedy/drama made a lot better by some of the greatest thespian talent in the English speaking world of the last century.

A secret British aviation project is being disrupted by a foreign power. Agent Charles Hammond (Ralph Richardson), is assigned the case. What follows is an espionage thriller that refuses to take itself seriously. Yet strangely, this odd mixture of screwball comedy and political potboiler actually works.

"Q Planes" (released in the U. S. as "Clouds Over Europe") was directed by an American, Tim Whelan. He establishes an anarchic tone throughout. He satirizes what his contemporaries considered too serious to examine lightly. In the story, British experimental aircraft are being "electronically" hijacked right out of the sky. The culprits' nationality is never identified, but you can guess their origin as soon as they speak their lines in that thick Teutonic accent.

The dialogue, much of it written and improvised by Richardson and his co-star Laurence Olivier, is crackling and smart. The action, though wildly improbable, is as unreal and stylized as the characters. The joker in the deck is Hammond himself. He boasts of his own considerable skills as a solver of crimes, crossword puzzles, and lovers' squabbles. Despite such brashness, Hammond is never tedious. Richardson plays him as an eccentric of many shades - horse-racing addict, amateur master chef, verbal wit extraordinaire, constant belittler of his valet (Gus McNaughton), and a man whose obsession with his case causes him to repeatedly ignore his beloved Daphne (Sandra Storme), the single character who bests Hammond in the film's fittingly ironic conclusion.

Hammond is aided on the case by his intrepid sister-reporter, Kay (Valerie Hobson), and a temperamental test-pilot, Tony McVane (Laurence Olivier), whom Kay picks up while snooping around an aircraft factory. Kay's character, a caricature of the working English suffragette, holds her own when competing with her two male cohorts - McVane, who hates reporters no matter their gender and Hammond, the egoist-as-detective ("I'm right - and the whole world is wrong!"). As if any enemy country could measure up against single representatives of MI-5, Fleet Street, and the RAF.