Spitfire ***
Dirs: David Fairhead, Ant Palmer. Documentary with the voice
of Charles Dance. 99 mins. Cert: PG
Post-Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, there will surely be more
of these retrospectives on the horizon, harking back to an age when Britain
laid claim to ruling waves and air alike. David Fairhead and Ant Palmer’s
documentary, released to mark the RAF’s centenary, bolsters its honourable core
project – preserving the testimony of former Spitfire pilots – with material
guaranteed to spike the pulse rate of aeronautical enthusiasts: footage of
surviving Spits being wheeled out of museum storage; yards of scratchy combat
film that underlines how distant these halcyon days now are; nuts-and-bolts
analysis of the planes’ defensive strengths. Only belatedly does it consider
whether these motorised killing machines might be as problematic as they are
emblematic.
The directors enter the archive with scholarly care and craft,
finding a useful early toehold in 1942’s flagwaver The First of the Few, where director-star Leslie Howard played
Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell. Narrated by unofficial-voice-of-Empire Charles
Dance and elegantly scored by Chris Roe, their own feature retains the contours
of a stirring underdog tale, as a squadron of plucky Kens and Geoffreys recall signing
up to see off the Luftwaffe, despite being outnumbered by a ratio of
four-to-one. These twinkly-eyed aces apparently needed scant prompting to
revisit their derring-do, generating gobbets of Spit-trivia: the planes’
elliptical wing design, we learn, was a cheeky crib from German WW1 fighters,
an instance of Teutonic aggression being turned against itself.
PG-rated and matinee-bound, the film can seem a trifle coy
about addressing the consequences of combat. Regular flights over rolling English
countryside position these planes as no more dangerous than their Airfix
replicas; the editorial broadly aligns with the serviceman who confesses “I
shouldn’t say I enjoyed it when other people were being killed, but...”. For
non-buffs, Spitfire will seem as curious
or niche as making a film in 2018 about the Ack-Ack gun; in the week a new
fleet of fighters have been commissioned to patrol our skies, there may be
reasons why these narratives are being returned to circulation. Yet in and of
itself, this cinematic time-capsule does its bit capably, even touchingly: the
memories are here, for anybody who wishes to cling onto them.
Spitfire opens in selected cinemas from today.
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