S. P. MacKenzie walks us through five films and two television series that involve the Battle of Britain, dating from 1939 to 1991, discussing not only the technical aspects of the productions but also the critical and popular receptions of each. His thesis, in part, is that these various representations of the Battle of Britain change in relation to shifts in attitudes and circumstances within Britain. It is a tame enough proposition but also one that could possibly allow for a broad range of discussions.
He opens with focusing on the 1939 film The Lion Has Wings and prefaces the film with a brief overview of mid to late ’30s films that apocalyptically foretold future wars and the impact bombing would have on civilizations (most pertinently, the H. G. Wells penned Things to Come [1936], as well as the newsreels reporting on the German bombing of Guernica in 1937). The Lion Has Wings is read, then, as a propagandistic response to increasing fears about the competency of the British air defense, as it was filmed with Royal Air Force (RAF) support, and the film triumphantly displays the clean-cut British pilots in white over the bearded, black clad Luftwaffe pilots. The film seemed to achieve its goals in assuaging public fears but was quickly rendered moot as it was released in late October 1939 just as the war was getting underway.
The remainder of the films covered in the book—The First of the Few (1942), Angels One Five (1952), Reach for the Sky (1956), The Battle of Britain (1969)—and the two television series, Piece of Cake (1988) and A Perfect Hero (1991), all follow a similar pattern: a discussion of the history of the production, a brief assessment of cultural attitudes toward the battle at the various periods these representations are made in, and finally, listing various critics remarks and box office numbers. The First of the Few is a film involving Leslie Howard as Reg Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire—that iconic beauty of the RAF and the battle itself—and is the first film to use Churchill's line on the RAF: “Never has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The films and series all treat the battle from various angles, with Angels One Five and Reach for the Sky offering competing views on whether it was “team play” or “individual bravado,” respectively, which won the day. The Battle of Britain attempts to tell the story from multiple perspectives and even introduce previously unaddressed or suppressed information, all while trying to attract younger audiences felt not to be familiar with the events. Piece of Cake presents a wholly cynical and farcical look at one fictional squadron, in an effort to demystify the heroic status of the RAF pilots. A Perfect Hero works against the cynicism of Piece of Cake, portraying one of the underaddressed outcomes of the battle—burned pilots and, in particular, one fictionalized pilot's attempt to overcome this particular adversity.
The early chapters of the book are both the most interesting and the most thorough in engaging with historical materials of the period. As a whole, though, in an effort to simplify, he oversimplifies, and the impact of these films on the public can only then be discussed in terms of box office numbers or television ratings. Even his employment of a wide variety of critical reviews lacks an analytical focus—at some point all opinions are valid about any particular piece.
One other scruple I have occurs primarily in the fifth chapter, which deals with The Battle of Britain: this book does not adequately deal with the depiction (or lack thereof ) of foreign pilots in the RAF. For instance, when listing the cast of The Battle of Britain, we encounter “Barry Foster (as the harassed commander of a Polish squadron)” (83), but we are given no accounting of this harassment. This “harassment” comes in the form of the Polish tongue, which the commander treats as obnoxious nonsense (he is incessantly telling them to shut up), and their heroics fall into the stereotype of the Pole as crazy and un-self-aware, if brave. With Enoch Powell's “Rivers of Blood” speech, and the conservative isolationist backlash that attempted to render such historic moments as metaphors for new, internal conflicts—the “us versus them” of the war could now become a war against an invasion of races—a moment such as this in the film needs to be more intensely interrogated. The 303 fighter squadron, one of four initial Polish squadrons in the RAF, scored 126 kills in the Battle of Britain, more than any other RAF squadron. This oversight cannot be accounted for by lack of documentation, as there have been several recent publications (The Forgotten Few: The Polish Air Force in the Second World War and A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron; Forgotten Heroes of World War II being just two) that fully account for the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain. This particular aporia in filmic representation is one thing, but not analyzing or critiquing it in a book that supposedly tracks public receptions through periods of shifting cultural attitudes is quite another.
Overall, though, the book is quite thorough in dealing with these individual films, and as I stated before, the early chapters are well worth the price of admission, especially as they show how films can anticipate events as well as reflect on them. In such a persistently powerful mythology, a book such as this pays due service in unpacking that persistence as well as understanding why such myths are required in the first place.
