The Great Air Race

It's time for another of those movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation and is going to be on again tomorrow. This time, it's Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. It's got two airings tomorrow, at 3:30 AM and 9:30 AM.

A brief opening segment that reminded me of Conquest of the Air tells us of the difficulties man had in learning how to fly. But the movie is set in 1910, which is seven years after the Wright Brothers' famous flight at Kitty Hawk, and now man can fly, although it's nowhere near as safe as it would become in more recent years.

One of those "birdmen", as the movie calls them, is British military man Richard Mays (James Fox). He's in love with Patricia Rawnsley (Sarah Miles), daughter of press baron Lord Rawnsley (Robert Morley), although Dad flatly forbids his daughter from flying considering how dangerous it is. However, Mays comes up with the idea of having an air race from London to Paris in order to show the superiority of British aviation. Lord Rawnsley realizes this would be excellent advertising for his newspaper, and agrees to sponsor just such a race.

News gets out, and people from all over the world want to join in the race, since it's got a fairly substantial prize. There's Frenchman Pierre Dubois (Jean-Pierre Cassel); Italian Count Ponticelli (Alberto Sordi); American cowboy Orvil Newton (Stewart Whitman); and an entire team commanded by Count Manfred Von Holstein (Gert Fröbe), although the Count is not supposed to be the pilot. There's also another Brit, underhanded Sir Percy (Terry-Thomas), who plans to cheat his way to victory. Just before the race is set to start, a member of the Japanese navy shows up.

Most of the characters are gentle stereotypes. As I mentioned, Orvil is a cowboy; Pierre is a lover who is part of a running joke about a woman he romanced whom he should know (several characters with different names, all played by Irina Demick); the Germans are the model of officious efficiency; and so on. It's all meant to be in reasonably good taste and reasonably suitable even for children, although they'd probably prefer the aerial stunts once the race actually gets going, which isn't until two-thirds of the way through the picture. One big sub-plot has Orvil falling for Patricia, which creates a fair deal of conflict between Orvil and Richard, although it all comes out right in the end.

The movie runs a bit long, although not as long as The Great Race, a movie from the same year which was about a car race at the beginning of motoring. Including the intermission, the print FXM ran was about 139 minutes. This means that things take a while to get going, and I don't just mean the race itself. The comedy more or less works, but there's also not as much comedy as you'd expect. Not that there's really drama; it's more that all the scenes are slow to develop. Of the two movies, however, I did prefer Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.