THOUGH it is badly named, an unpretentious, mild and serious-minded English movie—“Wings and the Woman”—is uncommonly truthful for a screen biography. More simply and logically than in any other movie for years, Director Herbert Wilcox got its point across: women have come out from the home to such an extent that now they ferry bombers. It’s done with the story of Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison, at one time “The Flying Mollisons,” or a man and wife who grew up in aviation trying to beat each other’s time through the air. Aggressive and businesslike Yorkshire Amy flew a rickety second-hand Moth in 1930 from London to India, at eighty-five miles an hour, but faster than anyone before her. She was also fastest from London to Tokyo, from London to Cape Town, and the first woman to fly the Atlantic. Extroverted Jim Mollison, who calls himself the playboy of the air, and writes more proudly of that than of his flying, flew the Atlantic one way or the other four times and is alive today ferrying bombers from English factories to RAF flying fields. In the same service, Amy was drowned in the Thames a year ago.
Unlike so many screen biographies, this one is not glorious with haloes nor embarrassed with melodramatic clichés of the “I did it all for Mother” type. The Mollisons are human if not so pretty. Amy breaks Jim’s record from London to Cape Town partly to settle a grudge against him; at the end of their flight across the Atlantic Jim’s stubbornness crashes them needlessly at Bridgeport, Connecticut; Amy divorces Jim, and Jim doesn’t go to pieces nor is he shown the light five seconds before you go home. Amy’s father is one of the best for feeling ever in movies, since he bears no resemblance to the wise Judge Hardy or the brave Mr. Miniver, and he isn’t funny at all.
This straightforward approach is not in the tradition of the best English movies, but its creation in terms of visual movement is, and ranks with Hitchcock, Rotha and Reed for that reason. Done in a world of miniatures, newsreels and canned airplane shots, it still seems more up in the air than most cockpit sagas. Careful documentary filming is combined with skillful montage and double exposure to achieve exact dramatization of early flying conditions. When Jim tries his first Australia-to-England flight, the Port Darwin airfield looks like the Dakota Badlands, has a ground crew of one, and is dangerously bounded by telephone wires. Even Jim’s vanity can’t get his overloaded plane high enough to clear and the take-off ends in a mess of wires. On Amy’s initial flight to Australia you experience the physical lashing a flyer took in one of those open cockpits, with the feeling that flying in 1930 was as close to nature as you could get. There are some breath-taking bits—the roll of clouds and sky, and what land looks like to the aviator who has set his heart for months on being the first to see it that way. Some things are the highest kind of movie expression, as a shot of the father standing in the wake of Amy’s plane, which in purely visual terms sums up—without slopping over—the emotions of such a moment. In a montage of three shots the divorce is accomplished.
With its rigid purposefulness the movie ran into some dead spots. The Mollisons were one record flight after another, so there’s a good deal of repetition, particularly of cheering throngs. Obviously difficult is filming in the air and capturing the movement of the plane while yet holding onto the individual inside. The picture is slow to get off, and to get Amy out of pigtails, and since most of the thrills happened early in her life, it rises fast, then levels off and finally sneaks out like a stowaway.
But this is a good movie and I wish there were more like it. The playing is thoroughly English, and the best English movie players know their business as well as any today. Robert Newton, who plays Jim Mollison, is one of these—he was the pugnacious bum of “Major Barbara.” Moving with loose slouchiness, his evil, ingratiating face suggestive in every shot, his speech carelessly foggy, he is in complete control of his medium and gives precisely the feeling of Mollison. Anna Neagle, with the square, hard face and thin lips, as Amy Johnson is polished and competent but less spontaneous and brilliant. All of the minor roles are cast and played with a careful sense of proportion. Still, it is less an actor’s picture than it is a director’s and cameraman’s.
August 24, 1942