by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a 1942 British production called The First
of the Few — released in the U.S. as Spitfire, after the famous British fighter plane that was
instrumental in Britain’s successful defense against German bombing raids
during World War II — and the plot of the film centers around the Spitfire’s
designer, R. J. Mitchell (Leslie Howard, in his final film before he himself
was killed in the war — he was on a morale-building tour to British troops in
North Africa when German pilots mistook his plane for Winston Churchill’s and
shot it down), and his work for a British aviation company called Supermarine.
Howard not only starred in the film, he produced and directed it — and when I
first saw The First of the Few,
on a public-domain VHS tape in the 1980’s, what startled me most about it was
that Howard, whom I’d previously written off as a rather dull milquetoast type,
gave a performance of real power, authority and emotional weight. Apparently
Howard as director was able to get much more out of Howard the actor than many
of his more highly-regarded and prestigious directors had been earlier in his
career! The script, written by Miles Malleson and Anatole de Grunwald from a story
by Henry C. James and Katherine Streuby, starts with a prologue featuring
actual pilots from the Royal Air Force playing themselves and being debriefed
by their squadron commander, Geoffrey Crisp (David Niven, who was then serving
in the British Army but was also still under contract to U.S. producer Sam
Goldwyn, so he needed dispensations from both the British government and Goldwyn to make the film
— given that this was a heavy-duty morale-booster the British government was no
problem, but Goldwyn demanded the U.S. release rights in return for letting
Niven do the film).
Crisp then reminisces about his days working with R. J.
Mitchell and being his test pilot, and the film flashes back to a scene in
which an unseen person is looking through a set of binoculars at a flock of
gulls flying over a beach. Leslie Howard’s voice is heard on the soundtrack as
Mitchell, saying that the birds are superbly engineered to fly and the only way
human aircraft will progress is if we abandon the preposterous contraptions of
wire, cloth and wooden struts that were the standard for aviation in the early
1920’s (when the film opens) and learn to build our planes like birds’ bodies.
He tries to put his theories into practice in his work for Supermarine, which
builds seaplanes (as their name suggests) that compete in the regular Schneider
Cup races. These really existed; they were a series of speed competitions for
seaplanes whose founder hoped they would spur improvements in aircraft design.
In 1923 the British have just lost the Schneider Cup to the Italians, and
Mitchell offers a revolutionary design he’s sure will win — a monoplane with
its gas tanks in the seaplane’s landing pontoons and its engines cooled by
radiator pipes built into the front of the wings, so the water is kept cool by
the rush of air over them. The plane crashes in the 1925 competition, but
Mitchell’s competitors pay him the sincerest form of flattery — imitation —
when during the 1927 competition, every other entrant is a sleek monoplane copied from Mitchell’s design.
Crisp flies the Mitchell plane to victory in 1927 and 1929, and looks forward
to doing so again in a new Mitchell design in 1931 — only the British
government, beset by the Depression, balks at hosting the race. A private
citizen, Lady Houston (Toni Edgar Bruce), who’s obsessed with Britain’s lack of
military preparedness — in one of the movie’s quirkiest and most powerful
scenes, she buzzes a private upper-crust party in a yacht emblazoned with
lighted signs reading “Down With the Government” and “Wake Up England” — puts
up the 100,000 pounds necessary to hold the last race. Crisp wins it for
Britain in Mitchell’s plane and thereby permanently retires the trophy (the
rule was that if one country won it three times in a row, they would get to keep
the prize in perpetuity and the series would end), leaving Mitchell without
much to do but putter around the garden and look after his wife Diana (Rosamund
John) and their children. Crisp talks the Mitchells into joining him on
vacation, and after a bit of debate as to just where they’re going to go, they
decide to visit Germany.
Unfortunately for Mitchell, but fortunately for his
country, they go to Germany right after Adolf Hitler has become Chancellor and
has started to organize so-called “gliding clubs” so Germany, barred by the
Treaty of Versailles from having a military air force, can train a new cadre of
pilots capable of flying the state-of-the-art powered planes Willy
Messerschmidt (Erik Freund) is designing and the Germans will start building as
soon as they repudiate the treaty. Mitchell is so scared by what he sees and
hears in Germany, he returns home determined to build Britain the ultimate
fighter plane, one powerful enough to out-fly, out-maneuver and overpower any
bombers or fighters Germany sends up against them in the war he’s now convinced
will inevitably come. He throws himself so intensely into his work designing
the Spitfire (a name that comes to Mitchell when he muses that what he needs is
“a bird that spits fire,” though according to an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor
the name was actually thought up by the RAF and the real Mitchell said, “That’s
the sort of bloody silly name they would choose!”) that he literally wears himself out. He visits a doctor and
is told that he must immediately take off work for at least a year or he’ll die
within eight months to a year, and later, when his wife urges him to see a
doctor, Mitchell laconically tells her he already has and he’s under a death
sentence, but he feels he has to accept his own mortality because his country
needs his plane. The Spitfire is finally completed and ready for testing —
intriguingly, there’s a socialist-realist montage of the various industrial
processes involved in producing the prototype scored with heavily “inspirational”
music by William Walton, but Crisp’s actual test flight of the Spitfire is
unscored — and the test is a brilliant success, but Mitchell is too ill to
attend it himself. Instead his wife goes and calls him after it’s over to tell
him how well it went. Mitchell dies a quiet death in his garden, but the film
continues with an epilogue returning to the Spitfires in action against Nazi
planes; when his flight commander is grounded by illness Crisp takes up a
Spitfire himself and shoots down the German fighter whose pilot got his best
friend “Bunny” Currant (one of the real-life pilots who played themselves on
screen). The film ends with a scene of silhouettes of Spitfires against the
British sky and a final title giving Winston Churchill’s famous encomium to the
pilots in the Battle of Britain: “Never in the field of human conflict was so
much owed by so many to so few.”
According to Ben Mankiewicz’ outro to the TCM
showing, Sam Goldwyn altered the film for its U.S. release, changing the title
from an obscure reference to Churchill’s speech (the original British title
essentially presents Mitchell as the first victim of the Battle of Britain) to Spitfire and re-editing it to include more close-ups of his
star, David Niven — but I’ve seen a version of this film titled Spitfire and my memories are that the two track so closely
they are virtually identical, even though TCM’s showing of the original British
print timed out at 119 minutes and the imdb.com page, which gives Spitfire as the primary title and The First of the
Few as the alternate, lists only a
90-minute running time. Either way, The First of the Few is a powerful film, full of the stiff-upper-lip
attitude the British take so much pride in, and given added resonance by its
being Howard’s only work as a director (at which he was quite good) and Howard’s own status as a war casualty, which gives a
sense of even greater loss to the movie than Howard and its other creators
intended when they decided that R. J. Mitchell had been “the first of the few,”
the first casualty of the Battle of Britain. It’s a beautifully understated,
underacted movie — quite a vivid contrast to the intense flag-waving propaganda
U.S. World War II movies that were made during the war — and even the stock
conflicts between the visionary Mitchell and his reluctant backers at
Supermarine, Vickers (a larger British aircraft company which buys Supermarine
midway through the film to get Mitchell’s services — plus ça change,
plus ça même chose) and the British
government are presented quietly and yet vividly. Though Leslie Howard had an
enviable star career — including a turn in the most popular movie of all time, Gone
With the Wind — playing mostly romantic
leads (in which his odd diffidence was a handicap, whereas here it works for
the taciturn character who’s playing a married man but one whose real emotional
relationship is to his work), there’s still a sense that he didn’t fulfill his
potential. Whether Howard could have developed into as good a director on other
subjects as he is here — in which he’s dramatizing the origins of what was
literally a life-or-death struggle for his country — is of course unknowable,
but both his performance and his direction in The First of the Few suggest a more powerful and more complete filmmaker
than he was allowed to show before the war first interrupted and then
tragically ended his career.
