Above and Beyond

The subject this film is based upon has no much potential for making a first class, exciting and meaningful product, but here it fails to live up to what might have been. One of my favorite documentaries is "Flying the Secret Sky", dealing also with shuttling desperately needed bombers to England. It features interviews from the actual pilots, while being a documentary I give it a 9, heads above "Above and Beyond" which I rate as a 3. It could have been a good picture but it suffers mightily from HORRIBLE dialogue and abysmal casting. Attempts to build sexual tension between the airport tower controller and the female lead, who left rural Newfoundleand for Montreal, but now she's unhappily forced to return to work closely with her ex steady, fall flat. The way she deals with the ex and with her nasty, uber controlling, mother just seem clumsy and unrealistic. The bratish and very corny dialogue doesn't help. In some ways the screenwriter feels the need to educate the viewer by illustrating the characters quirks over and over, laboriously. as if the audience has an average IQ just above an orange. Lord Beaverbrook is a lecherous old man who likes to hang up on a caller who is begging for clarification in order to carry out an assignment. We get to see him preform the little trick time after time. The RAF project director who is on the opposite end of the phone is as sullen and wooden as a cigar store Indian, a completely unpleasant character. We see Beaverbrook buttoning up after bedding a secretary a bit too often, WE GET IT. The female lead is a pitiful actress who spits out the predicable and simplistic lines like a 3rd grader in a school play, with a bitchiness that doesn't work. Her appearance, this is a 3 hour film after all, is distracting, she is a combination of Olive Oyl. with Clark Gable Asian Elephant ears, playing the role of a sex- tease with is supposed to be drop dead beautiful and unresistable, twisting the boys around her pinkie finger. The part calls for a Julie Roberts-type, we get Popeyes main squeeze, instead. Avoid this little mini-series, the lines will put you in a stuper, the characters are distracting and very unlikable. If you wish to delve into the topic get a copy of Flying The Secret Sky, it's exciting and keeps you glued to the screen, the real life pilots are charming, humble despite their accomplishments having shown extraordinary courage. Because I love flying and I've studied WW II extensively I wanted to like this movie but I found I couldn't just watch it and relax letting myself be entertained. Everyone is PO'ed at each other, their words snotty without a glimmer of wit. If I never see the female lead in another project, I will be grateful. Folks don't quit your day jobs, you'all can't write, direct or act.

That this was definitely not a great production. Although I admit that the story was entertaining and the acting wasn't bad. The computer generated imaging was terrible, and in almost in every scene I could see historical inaccuracies. All in all, a very amateurish production. Here are some factual inaccuracies I found.

• The DC-3 shown was equipped with the wrong engines (modern turboprops), and of course sounded nothing like a DC-3.

• One scene shows a de Havilland Chipmunk trainer in a hangar. There were no Chipmunks in service in 1940; the first one flew in 1946.

• The RCAF ensign with maple leaf roundel was not in use in 1940. Use of the RCAF ensign with the leaf in the roundel wasn't used until 1941. If you saw a flag in 1940 it would have been the RAF ensign.

• The USAAF landed in Gander in a Lancaster bomber. The USAAF did not use Lancasters, and certainly couldn't have been using them in 1940 since they were not yet in active operational service.

• A modern dial tone could be heard during overseas telephone calls between Bennett and Lord Beaverbrook.

I rather enjoyed this movie. The costumes were excellent, the music was fantastic and the acting, if not Oscar worthy, was solid. The actors portraying the Newfoundlanders did themselves credit by portraying down-home, friendly characters in true East Coast style. Liane Balaban, who played Shelagh Emberly, was not great, her delivery lacked any real emotion but she carried herself well and wore the '40s era fashion with style. Richard E. Grant was amazing as Captain Bennett and Joss Ackland brought Churchill to life with vitality. Allan Hawco, who played Nathan Burgess, was a joy to watch, his performance was excellent. All in all it was wonderful to watch a movie about WWII which promoted Canadians and Newfoundlanders and our involvement in the war effort.

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.