The Lion Has Wings (London Films, United Artists, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 30) I watched a couple of interesting films on Turner Classic Movies as part of the last night of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actress Merle Oberon. The first one was a 1939 British World War II propaganda piece called The Lion Has Wings, produced by Alexander Korda based on a story by Ian Dalrymple, who also got credit as associate producer. According to TCM host Alicia Malone, Korda made this film in an attempt to get Britain’s newly appointed prime minister, Winston Churchill, to agree not to close the British film industry (as had happened during World War I) by proving that British movies could be useful for propaganda. Sorry, Alicia, but the dates don’t line up: Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister of Britain until May 1940, eight months after the war started and six months after this film’s release on November 3, 1939. Neville Chamberlain was still Prime Minister when The Lion Has Wings was made, which explains why the film definitely soft-pedals any criticism of his appeasement negotiations at Munich in 1938. The film is a peculiar hybrid of documentary footage and scenes with actors, though the documentary scenes not surprisingly are by far the most moving and powerful portions. The film had three directors: Michael Powell, Adrian Brunel, and Brian Desmond Hurst. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Powell directed the scenes of the Royal Air Force (RAF) bombing German destroyers in the Kiel Canal. Hurst directed the scenes with Ralph Richardson (playing a Canadian pilot who volunteered to fight with the RAF well before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941) and Merle Oberon (as his wife), though she’s only in two scenes; in her second one, as she and Richardson are picnicking outside during a brief lull in the fighting, she delivers an inspirational speech about how in previous wars Britain had to sacrifice her young men on the land and sea, and now she has to do so in the air as well. Brunel directed the portions of the film that show how the British air defenses found out about upcoming German attacks so the RAF and Defense Command could mobilize and fight back against them.

The movie doesn’t mention the key tool the British had at their disposal – radar – because in 1939 the very existence of radar was still a closely guarded government secret. (During the real Battle of Britain that followed this film, the German air command figured out the importance of radar and tried to neutralize it by bombing the radar stations out of existence, but after one attempt at a raid on them the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, decided attacking them was a waste of time and ordered it stopped.) The film was roughly in three parts: a successful air raid against German ships in Kiel; a successful defense against a German air attack; and morale-boosting portions at both the beginning and end. The commentary was both written and delivered by E. V. H. Emmett, who was the usual newsreel narrator for Gaumont-British (which got an acknowledgment for the loan-out in the credits), though when the film was released in the U.S. his narration was replaced with one by veteran American newsreel commentator Lowell Thomas. (I watched the version with Emmett’s narration, thank goodness.) The opening sequences show a contrast between calm, easygoing, peace-loving Britain, with its relatively accessible leadership (I was surprised at how easy it was to recognize King George VI because he looked much like the younger appearance of the current King, his grandson Charles III) versus those of the Germans, who had to be protected by massive armies of bodyguards marching in strict formation. Naturally Korda and his directors and crew poached most of their Nazi footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will (filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, and released in 1936), enough so that Riefenstahl practically deserves co-credit as a fourth director. They also poached footage from a previous Korda production, Fire Over England (1937), to show how Queen Elizabeth I mobilized her people to resist the Spanish Armada – which is how actress Flora Robson got credit for playing Elizabeth I even though she wasn’t involved in any original scenes – as a morale-boosting example for the British of 1939.

The film does have some historical lapses: the RAF pilots are shown training in biplanes, which weren’t used in combat during World War II; and the scenes showing a Nazi bomber were actually a German passenger plane, the Focke-Wulf FW 200. The bombing raid on Kiel was shot largely in the studio, with professional actors playing the crew and the actual destruction of a German ship reproduced with a model on a special-effects stage. But once the pilots return to base having accomplished their missions, we see the real ones and the film suddenly leaps up several notches in realism and believability. Michael Powell wasn’t particularly proud of the film in later years, especially since he was pulled off a project he particularly enjoyed, The Thief of Baghdad (1940) – on which he also had two other co-directors, Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan – to do his assigned work on it. Powell later said that The Lion Has Wings was “all shop-made, edited, and directed in less than a month” – obviously Korda was rushing through production to get the film out when British audiences needed to see it as a morale booster – and he didn’t care for it after the fact, either. He called it “an outrageous piece of propaganda, full of half-truths and half-lies, with some stagy episodes which were rather embarrassing and with actual facts which were highly distorted.” Seen today, The Lion Has Wings is an intense and surprisingly vibrant piece of work, though the actual documentary footage is far stronger and more powerful than the scenes involving actors (no surprise there!). Ironically, when Churchill finally did become Prime Minister in May 1940 he did shut down the British film industry “for the duration,” though he licensed bits of it to come back online in 1942 and in 1944 he green-lighted Laurence Olivier’s production of Henry V as an obvious propagandistic morale booster. (Ironically, Shakespeare had written Henry V in the first place as a morale booster to build public support for the Earl of Essex’s military campaign in Ireland – which went wretchedly badly for the English and was what caused Essex’s support from the Crown to dwindle and ultimately disappear altogether.) When Churchill ordered the British film industry closed in 1940 Korda, Powell, Berger, Whelan and their cast and crew took their unfinished movie to Hollywood and completed it there, then made another big, splashy jungle-themed adventure, The Jungle Book (1942).