THE FIRST OF THE FEW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 227, 29 October 1943, Page 21

THE FIRST OF THE FEW

(Geumont British)

[_ESLIE HOWARD'S ° last film is, in one respect, anyway, a good one to remember him by, for it presents him as we had come to know him

best-the "typical Englishman,’ detached and subdued; the gentle dreamer rather than the man of action, though when occasion demands it, he can come to grips with reality. As portrayed by Howard in The First of the Few, the aircraft designer R. J. Mitchell, was a man who lay on his back in the sun, watching the seagulls, and dreaming of an aeroplane that should be built "all in one piece like a bird," and who lived to make his dream come true in the form of the Spitfire. He did not live long enough to see his creation help turn the tide in the Battle of Britain, but it was for some such crisis as this that Mitchell designed it, and the film is a tribute to his foresight. Just how much of the film’s success with British audiences depends on its patriotic appeal, and on the fact that it is a tribute to Mitchell as well as Leslie Howard’s last appearance, it would be impossible to say. If the film could be judged unemotionally, and solely on its merits as an example of screen biography, I believe that it would not compare, from a dramatic, artistic, or factual viewpoint, with, say the Van Heflin picture Tennessee Johnson, which is screening concurrently. Good acting is probably the strongest point of The First of the Few-and it does not all come from Howard. David Niven’s performance is almost as notable: he plays Crisp, the happy-go-lucky young test-pilot, who encourages Mitchell, in the face of disappointments and official apathy, to pursue his vision of a plane that will revolutionise flying, and who flies the planes that materialise from the vision. The story begins in 1933, runs through a series of Schneider Cup races, and reaches its climax in 1937 with Mitchell’s death through "overwork" (actually cancer), after he has visited Germany and realised Britain’s urgent need to be prepared against the Nazi threat. Almost. inevitably, the tale is told in retrospect-an hour and threequarters of reminiscing about Mitchell by the man who knew him best, while young Spitfire pilots take time off from the Battle of Britain (then at its height), and cluster round Crisp, now their Station Commander, to hear the facts about the inventor of their planes, who has already become almost a legendary figure. No one will begrudge those pilots their hour and _ threequarters off from the job of shooting down Heinkels and Messerschmitts, but it would have been a good thing for the film itself if their Station Commander had cut his narrative shorter. And since the narrator is supposed to be giving the facts, it is a pity he did not stick to them. * * * HIS is where you should perhaps stop reading if you are interested only in The First of the Few as entertainment. Since I hardly know the difference myself between an aileron

and a fuselage, it is where I might have stopped writing if my attention had not been drawn to a review of the film. by P. G. Masefield in The Aeroplane for September 4, 1942. Masefield, who is a recognised technical ' expert, says: "Judged solely as a film story of an aircraft designer who produces a single-seater fighter out of a racing seaplane im collaboration with a flirtatious test-pilot-cum-R.A.F. officer-cum-playboy, The First of the Few is undoubtedly first-rate entertainment. Judged as the story of R. J. Mitchell and the Spitfire’s evolution, any resemblance to the truth is purely accidental, and the ardent picturegoer is left with an utterly wrong conception of both the design and the designer. Almost every conceivable mistake has been made, both unintentionally in detail and-presumably-purposely to emphasise the drama and to catch an amusing sidelight. We notice that a Mr. Sidney Cole was billed as Technical Adviser. If his technical advice was on the aircraft side, it was either ignored or ill-informed. . . Regretfully we must label this effort "The Worst of the New." Masefield back up his statement with a long list of technical inaccuracies both in the design of planes and in the presentation of events in recent aviation history. I do not propose to record them here, though many of them must surely be recognised with annoyance by those in the audience who are seriously airminded. But some of Masefield’s charges deserve more detailed consideration. One is the "glaring miscon- , ception" conveyed by the film that the’ Spitfire was solely responsible for. victory in the Battle of Britain in 1940. "From first to last there is no mention of the Hurricane, although there were many times more Hurricanes than Spitfires fighting in the summer and autumn of 1940, and to Sydney Camm rather than to the late R. J. Mitchell goes the honour of designing the fighter which saved Britain from defeat. The two cannot be separated in fact." Another serious error to which Masefield draws attention is that Mitchell, dying of "overwork," is shown to be inspired by a newspaper headline"German bombers wipe out Spanish town"-to finish désigning the Spitfire instead of taking a holiday to save his life-whereas in actual fact the Spanish Civil War did not begin until after the prototype Spitfire was completed and had passed all its tests! * * * LL this, you may say, is not really important to the average person. I think it is, but shall have to wait until next week to say why. Meanwhile, let us consider another new film in which historical fact takes a bad beating.