Spitfire soars on to the silver screen
Spitfire
PG cert, 97 min
Dirs David Fairhead, Anthony Palmer
‘There are some people who’d rather have a flight in a Spitfire than spend their pension money on a Jag,” a 99-year-old pilot points out in this lyrical documentary. Narrated by Charles Dance, this is a film that will thrill those people – but it’s not only for them.
It captures the tactile pleasure of the plane’s design, lingering on a hand as it grazes the edge of a wing. Newsreels and grainy but gripping gun-camera footage are intercut with sumptuous new footage (shot with flair by John Dibbs) of some of the few remaining Spitfires in the air. It’s the pin-sharp memories of the people who flew them, however, that give this film its broader purpose and appeal. That 99-year-old pilot, for instance, is Mary Ellis. During the Second World War, she flew more than 1,000 aircraft – including hundreds of Spitfires – from their factories to the RAF airfields. If there’s anyone who has an excuse to be bored of them, it’s her. And yet, the elegance of the Spitfire – “like a dancing fairy” – still enthralls her, even though she’s not blind to its faults. The plane, she says, was “a lady in the air but a b----- on the ground,” difficult and dangerous to land.
It’s an interview that gets to the heart of Spitfire’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach, at once enlarging and undercutting myths about the plane. The life of its inventor, RJ Mitchell, is partly told through clips from The First of the Few, Leslie Howard’s celebrated drama about him. But Spitfire challenges that film’s portrayal of Mitchell’s solitary genius; we learn that one of his colleagues, who previously worked for the Luftwaffe, may have copied the famous elliptical wing from an earlier German design.
The highlight is an interview with flying ace Tom Neil, who describes his part in the Battle of Malta: “I hated taking off at dawn. Why in God’s name can’t we do it after a good lunch?” It’s poignant to see him so bright-eyed and full of energy, having read the news of his death just last week.
The giddy younger enthusiasts who pop up here – one calls the Spitfire “the most beautiful machine man has ever made” – might be irksome if they weren’t balanced by the grit of the first-hand accounts.
To many of those who used them as weapons, “this Spitfire business” is baffling. “The aura around the Spitfire is a postwar thing,” one shrugs. “It was just an instrument of war then.”
Spitfire manages to hold that aura in check, while making the most of its shimmer.