FrogGlace
In other words,this film is a surreal ride.
Micah Lloyd
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Cissy Évelyne
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
edwagreen
The film, though a good one, seems to have a rushed up ending to draw to the climax as soon as possible. I guess that is called film budgeting.Ralph Richardson, in a way, is comedic here and that was something different for the veteran screen star. As the head of the bureau, he is often right exactly where the action is, while he has to constantly disappoint a female dinner date who can't get to tell him something.The film involves planes with special secretive equipment mysteriously disappearing throughout the world as the war clouds in 1939 are gathering. Laurence Olivier is one of the pilots and he makes sure that when one plane is downed, it doesn't have the necessary material leading the spy ring involved to kill the British employee who was in cahoots with them and thus opening a Pandora's box.Valerie Hobson is a waitress whose shifty eyes and questioning reveals that she is much more than a waitress- a newspaper reporter itching to get information on exactly what is going on. Coincidentally, she is the sister of the Richardson character and soon the love interest of Olivier.Would have rated this even higher had it not been for the rather quick ending to a sordid affair.
blanche-2
You really can't go wrong with Ralph Richardson in a cast, and it holds true with "Clouds Over Europe," a 1939 film that also stars Laurence Olivier and Valerie Hobson. It's pre-WW II, and Richardson plays a secret service man in England who is convinced that a series of missing planes from diverse places is no accident. He's convinced the planes are being sabotaged, but by whom, and why? Olivier plays one of the pilots, and he's funny as well as handsome. Valerie Hobson is a reporter in an adversarial relationship with Olivier. She turns out to be related to someone else in the film.But it's Richardson who steals the show with his eccentric portrayal of Major Charles Hammond, a man who always forgets his umbrella and returns for it. He helps to give this affair a lightheartedness that makes it enjoyable.Recommended for its very good British cast.
nk_gillen
A secret British aviation project is being disrupted by a foreign power, until an effete but supremely confident intelligence agent, Charles Hammond, is assigned the case. What follows is a tense espionage thriller that refuses to take itself seriously. Yet strangely, this odd mixture of screwball comedy and political potboiler actually works. "Q Planes" (released in America as "Clouds Over Europe") was directed by an American, Tim Whelan, who establishes a near-anarchic tone throughout. Here, he satirizes what other late-1930's filmmakers may have considered too serious a subject to examine lightly: a potentially disastrous affair for King and country, in which experimental aircraft are being "electronically" hijacked right out of the sky and docked within the confines of a large ship from a hostile nation. (The culprits' nationality is never identified, but as soon as they speak their lines in that thick Teutonic accent, we can just about guess their origin.) The dialogue, much of it written and improvised by the actors themselves, is crackling, smart; and the action, while wildly improbable and clumsily staged, is as unreal and stylized as the characters. The joker in the deck is Hammond himself. As portrayed by Ralph Richardson, he boasts to anyone who will listen of his own considerable skills as a solver of crimes, a solver of crossword puzzles, and a solver of lovers' squabbles. Despite such brash self-assurance, however, Hammond is never tedious. Richardson plays him as an eccentric of many shades and interests – horse-racing addict, amateur master chef, verbal wit extraordinaire, constant belittler of his "gentleman's gentleman" (Gus McNaughton), and a man whose obsession with the intrigue of his case causes him to repeatedly ignore his beloved Daphne (Sandra Storme), the single character who bests Hammond in the film's fittingly ironic conclusion. Hammond is aided on the case by his intrepid sister-reporter, Kay (Valerie Hobson), and a temperamental test-pilot, Tony McVane (Laurence Olivier), whom Kay picks up while snooping around an aircraft factory. Kay's character may have been intended as a caricature of the "liberated" working English suffragette. But she holds her own when competing with her two male cohorts - McVane, who hates reporters and let's rip whenever he hears mention of Kay's profession, and Hammond, the charismatic, ardent egoist-as-detective. "I'm right!" he proclaims to his doubting superiors. "I'm right - and the whole world is wrong!" Naturally, Hammond's irregular method of sleuthing bears out his claim – as if any enemy country could measure up in a contest against single representatives of MI-5, Fleet Street, and the RAF.
peterjamesyates
A 'Korda Collection' classic film and I shan't part with my videocassette - 'Tiger' comic script and stilted dialogue notwithstanding. Doesn't even matter that McVane appears to take off in a different airplane to that which is captured and seen in flight. Only trouble with Valerie Hobson is she retired too early.
