Clouds Over Europe

Experimental craft are disappearing. Why? Because villain uses a ray to disable the craft, then captures craft and crew intact. There must be half a dozen Bond films with this plot. The villian's henchmen are also very much in the Bond mold - running all over the ship like so many ants in an ant colony. Only difference is that these henchmen are more realistic; they are harder to kill, and are better shots.

Some 20 years before Ian Fleming started writing about these things, it's nice to know that the British Secret Service was on the job and apprehending spies and saboteurs even if they're a bit slow to catch on at times.

With a little inside help from the air plant, some Teutonic looking gentleman have perfected a ray that immobilizes airships and brings them down real nice on the ocean. No trace of about four warships has been found at all or their crews. It's of concern to test pilot Laurence Olivier, to British agent Ralph Richardson, and to news reporter Valerie Hobson.

Hobson and Richardson are brother and sister. As you can imagine his job involves secrecy and undercover work and Hobson's from the Lois Lane school of journalism. Family dinners must really be something in that family. She also falls for Olivier while she's undercover working as a waitress at a coffee shop near the plane factory.

Q Planes must have been seen as wildly fantastic by the 1939 audience, but two generations who saw Sean Connery and Roger Moore engage in even wilder derring-do than is shown in this film, would regard Q Planes as all in a day's work.

Olivier and Hobson are fine, but Richardson steals the film whenever he's on screen. Q Planes will never be ranked as in the top 10 of any of these players, but it's a nice breezy espionage comedy/drama made a lot better by some of the greatest thespian talent in the English speaking world of the last century.

You really can't go wrong with Ralph Richardson in a cast, and it holds true with "Clouds Over Europe," a 1939 film that also stars Laurence Olivier and Valerie Hobson.

It's pre-WW II, and Richardson plays a secret service man in England who is convinced that a series of missing planes from diverse places is no accident. He's convinced the planes are being sabotaged, but by whom, and why?

Olivier plays one of the pilots, and he's funny as well as handsome. Valerie Hobson is a reporter in an adversarial relationship with Olivier. She turns out to be related to someone else in the film.

But it's Richardson who steals the show with his eccentric portrayal of Major Charles Hammond, a man who always forgets his umbrella and returns for it. He helps to give this affair a lightheartedness that makes it enjoyable.

Recommended for its very good British cast.

Everyone involved with this brisk comedy/thriller seems to be enjoying themselves immensely. It's a ripping yarn about spies, disappearing planes and a secret ray gun, lit up by Olivier and Richardson, with lots of cheerful gags along the way. It's dated, of course, but if you can leave that aside it's still good fun.

The young Oliver and Richardson -- especially Richardson -- are obviously having a ball in this mix of spies, high adventure, and tongue in cheek comedy According to Michael Powell, the two stars tore up the script, and devised their own scenes, and the pleasure they have in sending up the material, and in each other's work, shines through. (In fact, once or twice, Oliver seems to be trying not to crack up at Richardson's antics.) Patrick Macnee says he based The Avengers' John Steed on Richardson's character in this film, and that, too, shows. Thrills, spills,secret rays, gags and eccentric British characters, and villains from a country suspiciously reminiscent of Germany, but not named in 1938.