One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is a British war film first released in 1942, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  The film stars Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles and Hugh Burden.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


1941.  In a raid over Nazi Germany, the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber are forced to bail out when their aeroplane is damaged by enemy fire.  They land in occupied Holland and have the good fortune to meet up with a fiercely patriotic resistance group.  However, one of the airmen has managed to get himself separated from the others.  If he is caught by the German patrols, all of their lives will be in danger.  Their new Dutch friends insist that the airmen must leave the country as soon as possible and contrive a scheme to get them back to England...

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is one of the great wartime propaganda films of British cinema, an effective drama that provided a much-needed boost to the morale of the British people in the early years of WWII.  It was the first film that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made for their newly formed production company, The Archers, although they had collaborated on three previous films, all wartime propaganda films.

Although slightly less well regarded than Powell and Pressburger’s other war films, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing still has a great deal to commend it.   After an intriguing pre-credits sequence, the film’s opening segment plunges the audience straight into wartime drama with a spectacularly realised recreation of an RAF bombing mission.  What this sequence has, and which many similar war films lack, is the human dimension.  The characters are portrayed not as action heroes but as ordinary men doing an extraordinary job.  They chat casually about girlfriends and life back home whilst steering a course through enemy fire and preparing to bomb an unsuspecting town below.  The film’s naturalism is perhaps the most striking thing about it – war is portrayed not as a great adventure but as life as it happened to be at the time.  In some ways, the film presages the trend for social realism that would significantly impact on British cinema after the war.

The film’s excellent cast includes some familiar faces – Googie Withers, Bernard Miles and, in his first film role, Peter Ustinov.   Michael Powell also appears in the film, briefly as a radio operator.  The editing was undertaken by David Lean, one of the best technicians in his field at the time, who would soon embark on a highly successful career as a film director.   The film’s stunning photography – which achieves an effective synthesis of documentary realism and expressionistic lighting – was by Ronald Neame, one of Britain’s finest cinematographers, who would also turn his hand to directing within a few years.  With so much talent on both sides of the camera lens and with such a powerful story to tell, it is hardly surprising that One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is regarded by many as an essential WWII film.

© James Travers 2008

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