a5c7b9f00b It is 1940, and the diabolical mind of Adolf Hitler is planning to bomb England into submission to his warped dreams of a &#39;Fortress Europe&#39;. Standing between Britain&#39;s freedom &amp; Hitler&#39;s terrifying plans is the R.A.F - dedicated pilots who took to the skies again &amp; again in the face of overwhelming odds. The German Luftwaffe&#39;s planes outnumber the R.A.F&#39;s by more than 2 to 1 - 650 planes of the R.A.F. vs. 2,500 of the Luftwaffe! These odds. however, do not deplete the determination of the R.A.F. to stop Hitler, andthe Luftwaffe launches wave after wave of Heinkel 111 bombers against British cities, the R.A.F. responds, under the leadership of Air Vice Marshal Park and Squadron Leaders Canfield and Harvey who lead the newest pilots of the R.A.F. into confrontation after confrontation with the Luftwaffe&#39;s experienced veterans, with the aim of driving Hitler&#39;s forces away from Dover&#39;s white cliffs for good… In 1940, the British Royal Air Force fights a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from gaining air superiority over the English Channela prelude to a possible Axis invasion of the UK. Guy Hamilton is a solid action film director. This shows in all his James Bond work &amp; in this film which recreates the desperate situation the British found themselves in 1941. The German side is well illustratedwellthe British.<br/><br/>There is a lot of talent in the cast of this with Michael Caine, Susanna York &amp; a lot of others. The acting is good though the scripted roles do not call for a lot of work by the acting crew.<br/><br/>Action sequences dominate this movie. The great thing is in 1969 Britain where it was filmed, there were still a lot of authentic World War 2 planes available. This gives the air force shots a Lot of realism. Overall the dogfight action sequences in this film aregoodany Guy Hamilton have ever filmed.<br/><br/>There is so much action that the film runs long, but in this case that is a good thing. The films seems to strive for historic accuracy too. Overall, a good film to watchit feels &amp; sounds like the real thing. While this was being filmed, the crew for this film had the largest functioning air force in the world at that time. Spitfires and ME109s were hot aircraft. They had large and powerful supercharged engines stressed to the utmost. When they were in a dogfight or were attacking bombers they didn&#39;t just stooge around in graceful turns they were whipped around in a tight vicious manner with engines screaming on full power and they would be jinking about constantly, zooming up, banking and diving and all in all it was an intense affair. You don&#39;t get any sense of this at all in the movie. Apparently the Spanish pilots of the ME109 were reluctant to impose any stress on their aircraft and so we only see them being flown gently. The whole effect isif the viewer is watching a genteel display of preserved aircraft. Also the bombs exploding on the airfields didn&#39;t explodebombs do with a devastating horizontal blast effect but were obviously just charges in a pit resulting in a puny upwards explosion with inexplicably applied flame effect. It is hard too imagine that such a subject could be rendered so boring but this film is just that.
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