Conquest of the Air

TCM is supposedly doing a programming feature on various studios this month, although with the recent revamp of the website and schedule pages it's difficult to tell. Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies from London Films, that being the Korda brothers, especially producer Alexander Korda. There's a new-to-me documentary about Winston Churchill and his wartime relationship with the studio that premieres on TCM at 8:00 PM with a repeat at 12:15 AM; one of the movies in between in Conquest of the Air, at 11:00 PM.

For as long as man could see birds fly, man has had a fascination with the idea of being able to fly through the air himself. Of course, Homo sapiens is not biologically capable of flight, having no wings; even if we did have wings our breastbones could not support the physical strength necessary to flap wings and fly. In antiquity and through medieval times, people tried flying by strapping artificial wings on themselves, but it didn't work, as a bunch of reenactments show us.

The first that we get something resembling real flight is in hot-air balloons, with France's Montgolfier brothers demonstrating the first practical balloon flight, even though steering and landing at precise points is still difficult. From there we get the glider and then the zeppelin and other dirigibles, powered by hydrogen since it's much lighter than air.

Finally, it was the Wright brothers in 1903 who came up with the first motor-powered airplane that successfully took off and landed. Development on airplanes thereafter was surprisingly active, at least until World War I came along and turned airplane development to using them as weapons. But after the war ended, development became peaceful again.

It was roughly at this point that the movie originally ended, having been released in Britain in 1936. But then Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, sending the UK into World War II, and this movie was pulled out of storage with an update added including some footage of Winston Churchill. Now, this added footage is not just World War II related, as there's coverage of the Hindenburg disaster, which occurred in May 1937, after the original movie was released. There's also mention of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart which happened in July 1937. (I didn't see a copyright date on the print TCM ran which is clearly the 1940 print; I also specifically went and re-watched the opening credits.)

Now, of course, there's no film footage before the 1890s, so as I mentioned the first half is clearly reenactments. One interesting thing is the casting of Laurence Olivier as Italian aeronaut Vincent Lunardi. But I think there's a lot of fake footage spliced in to the early flight stuff, of crowds running to view the planes. One other thing I found interesting was the mention of the various aviators as though they're household names that of course the audience of 1936 would have recognized.

But the flight footage that we get seemed to me surprisingly cursory and not particularly exciting. This, combined with an air of British Empire triumphalism, really brought the movie down a couple of notches for me. It feels like material that might have made an interesting two-reel short stretched out to a 65-70 minute movie, and doesn't work all that well as a result.

As far as I could tell from a search, Conquest of the Air has not received a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.