One of Our Aircraft is Missing

There is/was an outfit (Reel Vault, if memory serves), that produced gray-market versions of lesser-known British films on DVD and sold them here in the States. I got to blog about some surprisinly good films I'd otherwise never have heard of, such as Cottage to Let with Alastair Sim and Home at Seven with Ralph Richardson. Somehow, some better-known titles also showed up, such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's collaboration of One of Our Aircraft is Missing.

The title takes its name from reporting on British bombing raids during World War II, when an aircraft in a squadron would fail to return as a result of having been shot down. In this case, that aircraft is the bomber "B for Bertie". The crew, flying out of southeastern England, consists of two pilots, Haggard (Hugh Burden) and Earnshaw (Eric Portman); two gunners, Hickman (Bernard Miles) and Corbett (Godfrey Tearle); navigator Shelley (Hugh Williams); and radioman Ashley (Emrys Jones). Now, we know the plane is going to go missing, not just from the title of the movie, but because we're shown a plane going down right at the beginning of the movie, before the main action sets in.

So after all of that, the crew gets aboard the plane for a nighttime bombing raid of the Daimler-Benz works in Stuttgart. That bombing goes well, but on the way back, while the crew is flying over the Netherlands, the plane is shot. All six men are able to parachute out of the plane, but somehow the plane doesn't actually crash over the Netherlands, so the Nazis wouldn't know that they've got a bunch of British airmen in their midst.

This actually presents a problem for our airmen. After the make it to ground safely, they bury the parachutes to escape detection, and try to hide until they're discovered by a group of children playing. Well, five of them are discovered; the sixth couldn't find the other five. The children take them back to their village, where the villagers are generally anti-Nazi, but have to keep that a secret lest the Nazi occupiers destroy them. And the villagers debate what to do with these airmen for a fairly long time, for one good reason: there's no plane to prove that there are missing British airmen! For all the villagers know, these could be Nazi plants trying to rat out the Dutch underground. It's been known to happen.

Eventually, the villagers, represented by schoolteacher Els (Pamela Brown) since she speaks English, do accept the airmen and formulate a plan to get them out of the country by consistently moving them west from one gathering to another whenever groups of people can move, something that the Nazis control fairly tightly. The first move is to a Catholic Mass, where the priest is played by a very young Peter Ustinov right at the beginning of his career. Then there's a soccer game, and finally, close to the coast, the home of Jo de Vries (Googie Withers) who has a reputation of being pro-Nazi but that's actually a front.

If there's a problem with One of Our Aircraft is Missing, it's that most of the action is perfunctory. It's supposed to be a suspense movie, with us wondering whether any or all of the airmen are going to make it out of the Netherlands alive. In fact, there doesn't seem to be all that much suspense here as the airmen are able to move toward their destination fairly easily. Perhaps the Nazis of the movie (not much shown) didn't realize they had British airmen in their midst. Other than that, the movie is very competently made, thanks to a pretty stellar crew. In addition to some actors early on in their careers and the collaboration of Powell and Pressburger, there's also a young David Lean as film editor, along with another future director, Ronald Neame, doing the cinematography. No wonder the production values are so good.

I just wish that the story in One of Our Aircraft is Missing could have been fleshed out better. Still, it's definitely worth a watch to see the sort of war movie the British were making during World War II.