Out of the Clouds

After Ealing's 'Dead of Night', ensemble films-- sets of short stories linked by theme- caught on in Britain. And after 'Train of Events' (1949), Relph and Dearden had another bash with this pre-'Airport' (and pre-'Airplane!') compendium of tears, love and laughter set at London's Heathrow Airport. Michael Balcon eased the purse strings to permit shooting in Eastmancolour-- all those blue skies and silver speed birds-- but the cast, apart from Lorenz and the British-based American David Knight, is British Commonwealth (Robert Beattie, a Canadian, worked mainly over here) and the low-key tone is Anglo too.

'Out of the Clouds' can be seen as a continuation of the post-war 'victory against the odds' genre: uniforms, stiff upper lips, quasi-military routines with room for the odd romance or shared confidence between male pilots (officers) and subservient female stewardesses. During a sticky landing, the airport firemen standing by are shot from heroic low angles as if by Humphrey Jennings. Anthony Steel as a philandering, smuggling cockpit jockey is like the statutory bad apple in a POW camp.

But wartime memories feed into the film's inspiration in a less obvious manner. It reflects a brief surge of optimism about Britain leading the world in civil aviation.

Heathrow, though it looks like a desert here, has been operating for almost ten years. It is on its way to becoming the busiest crossroads of air travel, as well as the greatest noise pollution disaster in Europe. The central area already has its control tower and first purpose-built terminal-- a far cry from the tent city which hastily arose in 1945 after a cabal of civil servants and airline managers fooled Churchill into green lighting the forced appropriation of Middlesex's best farmland, on the pretext that the RAF needed a bigger field near London than Northolt. In the movie all the airliners are prop-driven; but De Havilland has just produced the first jet, the Comet, and its fatal metal-fatigue flaws are not yet understood.

Here on view is the half-forgotten period when passengers embarked so near the lounge that friends could wave them on board; when stewardesses, not Tannoys, addressed travellers courteously and by name; when security precautions were cursory; when BOAC and Pan Am embodied national pride; and, more fancifully, when a cabbie would give a foreign couple a tour of 'the real London' ending in his own home.

Interestingly the main plot concerns an Auschwitz survivor: very rare in film fiction 50 years ago. This Austrian orphan is diverted from marrying an elderly ex-GI in Wisconsin by meeting a young hydrologist who wants to make the desert bloom in the new Israel. Balcon seldom let his Jewishness show so clearly.

Britflick fans will enjoy plane-spotting faces such as James Robertson Justice, on the verge of Hollywood stardom in 'Land of the Pharoahs'; ever-fluttery, downtrodden Esma Cannon; Sid James, gambling on his wife's life with travel insurance; Terence Alexander, the future Charlie Hungerford of 'Bergerac', as a flight controller; Abraham Sofaer, celestial judge in 'A Matter of Life and Death', as a talkative Indian; and Bernard Lee, aka 'M', as a customs man with a nose for Steel's suitcase shenanigans.

Steel, as usual, projects suave unreliability, like a more reined-in Laurence Harvey. Twenty years later he would be outraging Corinne Cléry in 'Histoire d'O'.

I watched this on December 21st of December 2006, and it's really a thick fog covering most of the country, including of course London airports. The t.v. was full of pictures of massive crowds trying to get away. This film took you back to the same airport that is fog bound today. In those days it looked almost an enjoyment to be fog bound. It's a great old film full of atmosphere of the times. No drunken swearing passengers dressed as if they had come straight from work, all well behaved passengers who spoke very well and behaved admirably. None of the passengers complained it was the airports fault like today, all agreed it was the terrible weather. Good old fashion British black and white film, with stars of the day. Watch it again and again and you will find its different every time, its almost as if you were there It does what 'Oh Mr. Porter' and the 'Ghost train' did for rail travel fans, pure yester year atmosphere. Peachy Mead

I stumbled across this gem of a period piece recently, and the airline enthusiast in me couldn't pass it up. I wasn't disappointed. Heathrow (pardon me.... London Airport) is bustling with efficient airline personnel, sharply dressed and not at all worked up over the 12-hour delay caused by a thick London fog. Passengers all receive individualized attention, and are guided through their layover by attendants who address them each by name. These are innocent times for air travel. The airport restaurant divides those who have been through customs from those who haven't by simply hanging a red cordon across the middle of the room. No metal detectors or baggage scanners here. My favorite scene is the final one, an over-the-top display of the many different ethnicities in the terminal lobby, all in pairs, all wearing native dress. It's a contrived and forced attempt to create an environment which is natural today. Oh yes.... the love story? Of course it's there, along with all of the expected trappings of a 1955 B&W drama. But don't watch this film for the love story. Watch it for a loving recollection of the early days of air travel in all its naive glamour.

After enjoying the customer care experience arriving at Stansted Airport recently I was reminded of how air travel it's magic and romance in the past sixty years. I'd first saw this film over fifty years ago and a recent showing of it on the excellent Talking Pictures channel has reminded me of what a great film this was. A typical Ealing portmanteau film with several story lines for me as a lifelong plane spotter was to see the location shots at Heathrow with the BOAC Constellations and Stratocrusers on the tarmac was truly magic. and the next time that fly with Easyjet or Ryanair I'll try to imagine that I'm flying first class with BOAC

This is a fascinating ensemble piece, well directed by Basil Dearden, which creates a combination of personal dramas involving pilots, passengers, and airport personnel and shows how their stories cross and intermingle. Robert Beatty plays an ex-pilot who has become the head of operations at the airport, but hates being on the ground and longs to get back to his old job of flying over the Atlantic. But the doctor will not pass him. James Robertson Justice is an experienced pilot who repeatedly refuses to take off in a plane because he rightly says he hears something wrong with one of the four engines. Sid James has a bit part. There is a touching love story about two young people (played by David Knight and Margo Lorenz) who meet at the airport while waiting for their delayed planes to take off in opposite directions. The film works very well dramatically, but its chief interest today is the extraordinary portrait of Heathrow Airport as it was in the mid-1950s. In those days you could drive a car right onto the tarmac. Ah, those were the days, before everybody got up tight. Anyone interested in the history of commercial aviation needs to see this film, it is a 'must'. And it is very entertaining as well. It is not done in a semi-documentary style at all but is entirely done as a dramatic film which incorporates the details of the airport and shows how everything works.