A busy day at London Airport. Follow the lives and loves of the crew and passengers.A busy day at London Airport. Follow the lives and loves of the crew and passengers.A busy day at London Airport. Follow the lives and loves of the crew and passengers.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe modern phonetic alphabet for aircrew was set by NATO in 1956. The film uses older ones - George, Sugar, Fox, Oboe.
- GoofsEaling built one of its largest ever sets to represent the interior of the newly built Europa Building in the central area of what was then known as London Airport. However, this terminal, as its name implies, served only short haul airlines, long haul services used the temporary structures alongside the A4 Bath Road (known as "North Side") until the Oceanic terminal (later renamed Terminal 3) opened in 1961. Thus there would have been no BOAC personnel (or passengers) in the Europa building, as portrayed in the film.
- Quotes
Nick Millbourne: What's the trouble, Captain?
Captain Brent: I'm not happy about the port outer - she sounds a bit rough to me.
Nick Millbourne: Instruments check all right?
Captain Brent: Yes.
Nick Millbourne: The instrument say she's okay, the chief mechanic says she's okay...?
Captain Brent: Young man, let me tell you something. In the air, I am responsible for this aircraft and the lives of all on board her, and neither you nor anyone else - *including* the chairman of the corporation - is going to induce me to take her one inch off the ground until I am absolutely satisfied that she is in perfect order. Do I make myself clear?
Nick Millbourne: You make yourself clear.
Captain Brent: I'm right and you *know* I am. That's why I've flown more miles than anyone else on this airfield.
Nick Millbourne: [through gritted teeth] Of *course* you're right, Captain.
'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'.
- Oct
- Jan 27, 2005
Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Language
- Also known as
- Vingar ovan molnen
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- Runtime1 hour 28 minutes
- Aspect ratio
- 1.66 : 1