Excellent, a Must See

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

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.

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.

A secret British aviation project is being disrupted by a foreign power, until an effete but supremely confident intelligence agent, Charles Hammond, is assigned the case. What follows is a tense espionage thriller that refuses to take itself seriously. Yet strangely, this odd mixture of screwball comedy and political potboiler actually works. "Q Planes" (released in America as "Clouds Over Europe") was directed by an American, Tim Whelan, who establishes a near-anarchic tone throughout. Here, he satirizes what other late-1930's filmmakers may have considered too serious a subject to examine lightly: a potentially disastrous affair for King and country, in which experimental aircraft are being "electronically" hijacked right out of the sky and docked within the confines of a large ship from a hostile nation. (The culprits' nationality is never identified, but as soon as they speak their lines in that thick Teutonic accent, we can just about guess their origin.) The dialogue, much of it written and improvised by the actors themselves, is crackling, smart; and the action, while wildly improbable and clumsily staged, is as unreal and stylized as the characters. The joker in the deck is Hammond himself. As portrayed by Ralph Richardson, he boasts to anyone who will listen of his own considerable skills as a solver of crimes, a solver of crossword puzzles, and a solver of lovers' squabbles. Despite such brash self-assurance, however, Hammond is never tedious. Richardson plays him as an eccentric of many shades and interests – horse-racing addict, amateur master chef, verbal wit extraordinaire, constant belittler of his "gentleman's gentleman" (Gus McNaughton), and a man whose obsession with the intrigue of his case causes him to repeatedly ignore his beloved Daphne (Sandra Storme), the single character who bests Hammond in the film's fittingly ironic conclusion. Hammond is aided on the case by his intrepid sister-reporter, Kay (Valerie Hobson), and a temperamental test-pilot, Tony McVane (Laurence Olivier), whom Kay picks up while snooping around an aircraft factory. Kay's character may have been intended as a caricature of the "liberated" working English suffragette. But she holds her own when competing with her two male cohorts - McVane, who hates reporters and let's rip whenever he hears mention of Kay's profession, and Hammond, the charismatic, ardent egoist-as-detective. "I'm right!" he proclaims to his doubting superiors. "I'm right - and the whole world is wrong!" Naturally, Hammond's irregular method of sleuthing bears out his claim – as if any enemy country could measure up in a contest against single representatives of MI-5, Fleet Street, and the RAF.

A 'Korda Collection' classic film and I shan't part with my videocassette - 'Tiger' comic script and stilted dialogue notwithstanding. Doesn't even matter that McVane appears to take off in a different airplane to that which is captured and seen in flight. Only trouble with Valerie Hobson is she retired too early.