All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
Tyler over at the Portly Politico has a link to some of his content that would be of interest to all those who get into the spirit of Halloween.
“I did a whole series on my YouTube channel during October about various Halloween and/or horror movies, 31 Days of Halloween:
I think you’ll enjoy it!”
As a kid this was one of my favorite Universal horror movies. In a way it was the last of the legitimate Frankenstein movies from the series. Boris Karloff played the Monster for the third and final time. And they even brought back a couple of the actors from the original Frankenstein movie although as different characters. So, there was a certain amount of continuity with the first two movies. Basil Rathbone adds his considerable talents to the production as the titular son of the original Dr. Frankenstein. Lionel Atwill makes his turn as the memorable Inspector Krogh; he of the prosthetic right arm (which the Monster had torn off when Krogh was a child). And even poor Bela Lugosi is there as Ygor to lend his legitimacy as a part of one of the earlier Universal films (Dracula) that had a lot of “prestige.” Yes, this movie has everything. Not only does the younger Dr Frankenstein have a very pretty wife but he also has a curly-haired young son whom the Monster befriends. After this film the later Frankenstein films became kind of campy to my mind. So, this is the climax of the original films.
I won’t worry about spoilers because we know that the Monster will come back for endless sequels so let’s just talk about the story. Dr. Frankenstein and his family have arrived from the United States where he had met his wife. They find the villagers surly and suspicious because mysterious deaths have continued to occur in the village and the Monster is still blamed for these.
We find out that Ygor has been hiding the Monster below the ruins of the destroyed laboratory but recently the Monster was struck by lightning (!) and hasn’t regained consciousness since. Ygor wants the doctor to restore the creature. Ygor was a grave robber who was hanged for his crimes but somehow the hanging didn’t kill him so he went free. And now he’s befriended the Monster and it does his bidding. Doctor Frankenstein is intrigued by his father’s creation and we are shown him using “modern” medical equipment like a fluoroscope to examine the Monster. There’s some gibberish about his rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, cellular structure and we even find out that he has two bullets lodged in his heart which don’t seem to bother him at all.
So, the doctor sets up the generator and zaps the Monster but other than a short bout of consciousness he seems to have failed to rouse the Monster. But later on, we hear that the doctor’s little boy met a “giant.” And so, when the murders begin happening again both the doctor and Inspector Krogh are sure the Monster is on the loose again. After a dart game between Doctor Frankenstein and the Inspector (which was thoroughly lampooned in Mel Brook’s movie; “Young Frankenstein) we have the climax of the movie. Doctor Frankenstein kills Ygor in self-defense and the Monster kidnaps the little boy and brings him back to the lab. At this point both the Inspector and the doctor attack the Monster. Even after the creature tears off Krogh’s prosthetic arm, he manages to fire a number of bullets into the Monster. And Doctor Frankenstein outdoes him by a swashbuckling rope swing that propels the Monster over the lip of a ledge and into a very convenient, bubbling pool of 800-degree F sulfur-bearing magma.
Alright. It’s a silly movie. But it’s a lot fun. I’ve got a warm spot for this one. All the hand waving to make the Monster’s existence “scientific” appeals to the ten-year-old kid in me. They even go so far as to clarify that the “ray” that the original movie said was “beyond the ultraviolet” was actually cosmic rays. Well, cosmic rays! What more could you ask? Highly recommended for ten-year-old boys and other folks who like a good monster movie in black and white.
To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd. Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen. Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists. They are too ridiculous to consider.
Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination. But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.
Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night. Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel. Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is. Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite). Here he is shown Karen’s embalmed body in a giant bell jar. And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead. Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast’s daughter isn’t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.
The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim. Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice. Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan’s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall. Don’t ask me why such a room is part of the story. The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features. Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.
But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered. Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive. Joan sees this and starts screaming. Peter finds a gun that Poelzig’s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him. While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.
O, brother! Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig’s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches. And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top. There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd. And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff’s face, they show Lugosi’s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him. This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be. And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun. Only for fans of the genre.
There are a large number of performances of Pachelbel’s Canon by various musicians using various instruments but this one is the peak by my estimation. When I’m in a mood to just totally reject humanity due to the insanity, violence, cruelty, stupidity and seeming lack of any redeeming quality, something like this performance will recenter me.
“Going My Way” is a comedy drama that took a bunch of Oscars and was the biggest box office draw in 1944. And since it starred Bing Crosby it unsurprisingly had several musical numbers spread through the movie. It’s the story of Father Chuck O’Malley (Crosby) a Catholic priest sent by the bishop to rescue a New York City parish; St Dominic’s, from the overwhelmed exhaustion of its present elderly pastor; Father Fitzgibbon (played by Barry Fitzgerald). With a supporting cast that includes such veteran character actors as Gene Lockart, Timothy O’Dowd and William Frawley the film drops any pretense at reality and has Father O’Malley manage to reform a local gang of New York City teenagers and converts them into a church choir. He manages to raise enough money to pay off the mortgage by selling a song to a music producer. He saves a runaway teenager from trouble with the police and even manages to reunite Father Fitzgibbon with his ninety-year-old mother by finding a way to pay for her trip from Ireland.
Now clearly this movie has nothing to do with reality. Having grown up in a New York City Roman Catholic parish I can assure you that no priest of Father O’Malley’s caliber has ever been seen. But treat the movie as a fantasy from a much more innocent time and enjoy it for its virtues. Crosby comes across as eminently likeable and the whole movie is a feel-good experience that can be watched around the holiday season to try and believe that there are still good people walking this Earth.
Now the interesting thing is this movie has the distinction of being one of only a very few good movies that had an even better sequel. The next year (1945) Crosby returned as O’Malley, paired with Ingrid Bergman as a nun in the movie, “The Bells of St Mary’s.”
But with or without the sequel, “Going My Way” is a heartwarming and well-made film that I can highly recommend to anyone who still wants to believe in the possibility of human goodness and hope. There is comedy, human feeling and a sense of optimism in the face of hardship. A classic.
It is entirely possible that this is the first science fiction movie I ever saw. I seem to remember seeing this on tv as a pretty young kid (maybe seven or eight years old). For that reason, it had a huge effect on my perspective on entertainment. Of course, watching this movie after all these years is a shock from seeing just how ridiculous the whole production is. But at the same time there is a fondness based on the nostalgia it inspires in me, even after all this time.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
David MacLean is a young grade school boy whose father is an engineer at a local factory doing top-secret government work. He’s also friends with the local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston. David has a small telescope in his bedroom. One night he is awakened about four thirty in the morning by what looks and sounds like a thunder storm but as he watches out his window, he sees a flying saucer land in a sand pit located adjacent to his family’s property.
David runs into his parents’ room and tells them the story. Out of a desire to find out what had scared his son George MacLean goes outside to the sand pit to investigate. And the aliens open up a hole in the sand pit and capture George. When George does not reappear by daylight Mary MacLean calls the police and reports her husband missing. Two patrolmen in a squad car show up and while searching the sand pit area they are also captured by the aliens.
A little later George returns to his house and we immediately see that he is no longer the same man. Whereas previous to his disappearance he was a friendly husband and father, now he is a surly abusive man who backhands his young son for insisting that he saw the space ship land. Also, David discovers that George has a small X shaped wound on the back of his neck near his shirt collar. After a few minutes the two patrolmen appear at the house and they obviously behave just as George is.
And this pattern repeats as through his telescope David sees a little neighborhood girl Kathy Wilson being captured. Later George pushes his wife Mary into the sand pit. And off camera, the town’s Chief of Police also ends up captured too. With all these people now controlled by the saucer-men, their diabolical plan begins to unfold. They are trying to sabotage the nearby factory that is building an atomic powered rocket along with the other plants that are supplying components. Kathy Wilson’s father; Dr. William Wilson is a physicist who is designing the atomic rocket (although how a physicist becomes a design engineer is beyond me). So, she attempts to kill her family by burning down their house. George works in the factory creating the rocket engine so he and his wife attempt to assassinate Dr. Wilson with a high-powered rifle. And the two police officers successfully burn down the engine plant.
At first no one believes David when tells his story and the Police Chief has him imprisoned in a jail cell awaiting his parents’ appearance and probably his subsequent death. But the desk sergeant is disturbed by his obvious fear and calls a medical doctor to look at him. Dr. Patricia Blake listens sympathetically to David’s crazy story and when she finds out that they both know the astronomer Stuart Kelson, she calls him up and is told that David is a very honest and serious child. And when his parents arrive to get David, she notices that they really are behaving abnormally and so she makes up a story about David having symptoms of polio to prevent them from dragging him away.
Now Dr. Blake takes him to Stuart Kelston and we get a crash course on the latest theories on Martian biology. And somehow Kelston intuits that Martians have gotten wind of the atomic rocket project and they are here in their flying saucer to sabotage the project. And Kelston trains his enormous observatory telescope on the sand pit across town just as George MacLean pushes General Mayberry, who is in charge of security for the whole rocket project, into the sand pit.
Kelston springs into action. He calls the Pentagon and a Col. Fielding orders a mechanized brigade of tanks and other weaponry to descend on this little town. Orders are given to arrest the MacLeans, the Police Chief, the two patrolmen and General Mayberry. Only David’s parents are captured alive and are sent to a hospital to attempt to remove the control devices in the back of their necks. The army surrounds the sand pit and eventually finds the saucer and use explosives to open up a tunnel leading to the ship. Fielding and his men descend down and attack the “mu-tants” that serve the super-intelligent Martian. The servants are about seven feet tall covered with green skin and have bug-eyes. They shamble around so slowly it’s amazing they get anything actually done. The master is this little homunculus in what looks like a glass bell jar that the mu-tants carry around. He’s got a humanoid face on top of a body that’s an immobile lump with a few tentacles sticking out here and there. He seems to have been spray-painted with bronze colored paint. He controls his servants by telepathy which we observe as him furrowing his brow. At some point, David and Dr Blake are captured when a hole randomly opens in the ground below their feet. And they have to be rescued by the army and Dr. Kelston (he seems to be in love with Patricia Blake).
The last scenes are of the whole human team running away from the sand pit as the space ship begins to depart with a bomb that the army planted in it about to explode. In the last scene David wakes up and runs into his parents’ room to discover that the whole thing was a nightmare. He goes back to his room and falls asleep. But at four-thirty he’s awakened by noise and sees exactly the same sight of the saucer landing in the sand pit. The End.
My thoughts on this movie. Where to begin? Okay, so the whole movie drips with 1950’s cold-war paranoia. Every character portrayal is over the top and the dialog is pretty hokey. The astronomer’s explanation why the Martians are aware of this atomic rocket project makes no sense at all. And the idea that a local astronomer can summon an army by calling the Pentagon is pretty hilarious. As for the aliens, the costumes and the scenery in the tunnels are laughably bad and the space ship looks like a 1950’s set designer’s idea of a 2000’s manufacturing space. The special effects, mainly, an infra-red “ray gun” is pathetic. On the other hand, the personality of the boy; David is sympathetic and Dr. Blake comes off as a compassionate woman which is always attractive. And the whole action of the army in their “war” against the aliens is ridiculous. The colonel leads his troops into the tunnels and he’s firing machine guns at mutants instead of his gunners doing that. But it’s a great bit of nostalgia. The terrible special effects and the vintage military clips from WWII training footage is wonderful. And all the B-movie and television actors like Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke (The Abbot and Costello Show), Barbara Billingsley (Leave it to Beaver), Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on the Superman Show) and Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on the Dick Van Dyke Show) are so familiar and comforting. I highly recommend this movie for anyone who loves schlocky old sci-fi.
When I was young, every high school English curriculum would include a review of some classic short stories and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was inevitably among them. And rightly so. Within the space of seven thousand words London casts a spell that draws you into the inhuman realm of winter in the Yukon. We barely have a thumbnail sketch of the protagonist; “the man” and his unwilling accomplice; “the dog.” But we learn the tragic details of what can happen when a man ignores the physics of arctic winter weather.
‘At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.’
…
‘Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.’
…
‘A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.
…
He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.
“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.
…
Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.’
London reveals the emotions and thoughts that race through the mind of the man as he tries to escape the consequences of his terrible mistake. But at every turn he’s thwarted by the limitations that cold have imposed on his failing body. And we listen to his thoughts as his time runs out and he accepts his fate.
Jack London created a remarkable story. There is no filler. The story only includes what is needed to paint the picture of a tragic human tale. And I will say that if I ever write anything half as good as, “To Build a Fire,” I will consider myself an accomplished writer. Well done Mr. London.
Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century. He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.
In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title “Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.” One of these stories is named “Tristan” and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood. But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a “novelist” named Detlev Spinell. And novelist would be an exaggeration. No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him. In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting “the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.” He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman’s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.
And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down. And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death. And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building. He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in. The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his “plebian” tastes and lack of artistic feeling. And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).
Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully. And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense. The husband is a very plain and “normal” individual. A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist. He loves his wife and child but he isn’t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises. The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself. And then there is Spinell. He is an abnormal spirit of the “artistic” type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist. All ordinary things like the normal male/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality. Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.
The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him. He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary. But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife’s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death. The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:
‘“Is she dead?” yelled Herr Klaterjahn. As he spoke he clutched the Rätin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill. “Not quite? Not dead; she can see me, can’t she? Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh? Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung. Gabriele!” he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him. “Yes, I’m coming.” He said and dragged the Rätin after him…’
Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in. He uses art to hide from life. As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being. Spinell is a wraith. His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile. Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life. What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art. I find that powerful.
Guillermo del Toro is a horror story aficionado. He really loves the genre and has been dreaming for decades about filming Frankenstein. And being a “serious” director, he of course wants his version to be the definitive
one. Making the picture for Netflix means there will be a lot of cash available for sets, makeup, special effects and all the other expensive aspects of modern moviemaking. So, this movie will probably be visually stunning. And since del Toro has been around for a while and made several popular and critically acclaimed films with fantastical themes there is a good chance that his Frankenstein will have many good qualities.
The only question I have is whether anyone wants to see another Frankenstein. I’ve seen several film versions of the story and many years ago I read Mary Shelley’s novel. I’m not sure there’s anything left to dig out of that mine. In a way, the modern version of Frankenstein is Blade Runner. Man playing God and making men after his own image and then treating them badly is the story of Eldon Tyrell creating the replicants and then one of them; Roy Batty hunting him down and then killing his creator for making him a lesser being.
Do we still want the nineteenth century guess at what genetic engineering would look like? In the twenty first century we kind of already have the technology to play God. We could make a Frankenstein’s monster (or more like a Roy Batty). Do we still need the guy with the bolts sticking out of his neck?
Well, that’s the question I’m asking myself. I remember when Kenneth Branagh directed himself as Victor Frankenstein in a 1994 version with, of all people, Robert De Niro as the monster. It was really awful. And I think that may have quenched any future appetite on my part for this story.
Now maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe this will be a stunning production that captures something from Shelley’s story that elevates the movie into a great entertainment. I’ll be waiting for the movie to premiere on Netflix and I’ll see what the critics have to say. But I’m deeply skeptical.
I think the future of fantasy and horror will require new stories that speak to us in this age of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. But even stories like “The Matrix” and “Blade Runner” seem to be recycling old ideas. It’s going to take a poet with a PhD in cybernetics or gene splicing to make the next great mythical story. And who knows, maybe we’re tired of horror stories altogether. Maybe we’re looking for the next great fairy tale with a hero who lives “happily ever after.” Maybe in the next story the monster doesn’t hate and destroy his creator but pities and helps him instead. Now that would be a real curveball and might sell a hundred million tickets. That would be a story I’d pay to see. We could all use a feel-good story. In fact. we’re dying for one.
May I offer up this the 1985 SciFi Enemy Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) )? It is an excellent adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella of the same name, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen (of Das Boot fame). It had a low budget (40 Million) and its special effects are well, dated even for 1985. Excellent acting by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset as the principals. Bombed at the box office as it was Neither Star Wars, Dune, nor Wrath of Khan.
I would also like to add in the war film department the 1969 film Battle Of Britain . To say the storyline is weak is an understatement (although it is briefly redeemed by Susannah York prancing about in her knickers). The killer here is the aerial fight scenes. These involve LARGE numbers of actual Spitfires, Me109 and Heinkel 111 aircraft (Me109 and Heinkels being part of the Spanish Air Force). They are well scripted and had input from Douglass Baeder and Air Marshall Dowding. It has a G rating but some scenes are almost too realistic and freaked out the 8-year-old me, who dunned my dad into taking me to the movie.