Annakin's film, a favourite from my youth, still looks good today, standing up well in this age of overdone special effects and during a time when Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to inject charm into adventure projects. It's a film in the which the various entertaining episodes make the comparatively long running time fly by - (pun intended) - even if ultimately they add up to less the sum of their parts. Oddly, the final race, which occupies the last third of the narrative is curiously unexciting, if involving - it's a victim of the earlier distracting intrigues, as the colourful and varied activities of different characters overshadow the drama which initially drove them on. (Or as my second paragraph suggests, the real 'interest' is really elsewhere.) Standouts include Gert Frobe as the Colonel Van Holstein, the comic impact of which equals if not surpasses his appearance in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of three years later. Dastardly Terry Thomas and Eric Sykes make an inspired pair of lightweight villains, and only the minor involvement of the great Tony Hancock as a batty aero-inventor and the mugging of an unfunny Red Skleton makes one wish that the casting could have been shuffle some more.
To innocent eyes much of the film was great fun at the time and so it remains. In my jaded years a re-viewing has brought out a surprising sub text which I don't think has been addressed here yet. Besides being the account of the preparation and running of a great aeronautical race, TMMITFM also offers a parallel, adult narrative, mainly through puns, and visual suggestion - namely the fulfillment of Patricia Rawnsley (Sarah Miles). Patricia's first words (the first of the film) 'when are you going to take me up, Richard?' have a second meaning: as raunchy slang common in England, the fact of which cannot have escaped the scriptwriters. Its a hidden sense which, once started, can be carried on though the narrative. Naturally the fact that her skirt is accidentally removed twice - and almost again a third time - by Newton provokes suitable embarrassment on screen, and seaside-saucy laughs amongst the audience. But the less explicit sexual innuendo is carried on up to new heights when she is shortly taken aloft by the American (where, this time very aptly, his own pants come off) and squeals with the danger, handling that old phallic standby, the joy stick. In contrast to the virile American, Richard never 'takes her up'. Elsewhere the most overt sexuality of the film is part and parcel of the national characteristics of others, its offensiveness diffused by stereotyping: the Frenchman Dubois, whose multiple liaisons with the same woman is a charming way of representing lighthearted promiscuity and the Italian Count Emilio Ponticelli, whose marital fecundity shows the natural results of such unbridled reproductive activity.
Clearly the act of flying is to be taken literally and metaphorically in the film, as is the whole apparatus and ritual of going aloft, arguably right down to the Freudian appearance of a sewage farm next the 'field of pleasure' and the bright red firemen directed from a tower... For a closing confirmation of this, we have the almost final very suitable, line: Orville's disarming 'I need to have a look at my undercarriage, which has taken some beating..'. Such words easily indicate the dire results of the two competing sets of frustration which he currently faces...
To innocent eyes much of the film was great fun at the time and so it remains. In my jaded years a re-viewing has brought out a surprising sub text which I don't think has been addressed here yet. Besides being the account of the preparation and running of a great aeronautical race, TMMITFM also offers a parallel, adult narrative, mainly through puns, and visual suggestion - namely the fulfillment of Patricia Rawnsley (Sarah Miles). Patricia's first words (the first of the film) 'when are you going to take me up, Richard?' have a second meaning: as raunchy slang common in England, the fact of which cannot have escaped the scriptwriters. Its a hidden sense which, once started, can be carried on though the narrative. Naturally the fact that her skirt is accidentally removed twice - and almost again a third time - by Newton provokes suitable embarrassment on screen, and seaside-saucy laughs amongst the audience. But the less explicit sexual innuendo is carried on up to new heights when she is shortly taken aloft by the American (where, this time very aptly, his own pants come off) and squeals with the danger, handling that old phallic standby, the joy stick. In contrast to the virile American, Richard never 'takes her up'. Elsewhere the most overt sexuality of the film is part and parcel of the national characteristics of others, its offensiveness diffused by stereotyping: the Frenchman Dubois, whose multiple liaisons with the same woman is a charming way of representing lighthearted promiscuity and the Italian Count Emilio Ponticelli, whose marital fecundity shows the natural results of such unbridled reproductive activity.
Clearly the act of flying is to be taken literally and metaphorically in the film, as is the whole apparatus and ritual of going aloft, arguably right down to the Freudian appearance of a sewage farm next the 'field of pleasure' and the bright red firemen directed from a tower... For a closing confirmation of this, we have the almost final very suitable, line: Orville's disarming 'I need to have a look at my undercarriage, which has taken some beating..'. Such words easily indicate the dire results of the two competing sets of frustration which he currently faces...