“One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” is the second lap of a walking tour being conducted by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. On the first lap (“The Invaders”) six survivors from a destroyed German submarine were killed while walking across Canada. This second time six British fliers from the bomber called B—for Bertie—are seen sneaking through the Dutch underground back to England to fly again. After they bail out they are discovered hiding up in a tree by some likable Dutch farmchildren, who take them to Else Meertens, underground leader and pretty woman. She takes them through a church and a rugby game to Jo de Vries, underground leader and pretty woman. Then in a canoe to the North Sea and home again.
Mr. Powell is no Hitchcock. The entire journey is unmarred by casualties to the British fliers, danger to them, or by anything else that might break the ice (even the sixth flier, who got separated from the others, is come upon playing in a rugby game). Then they row down a Dutch river in the middle of the morning. The picture runs like a train schedule. Mr. Powell is obsessed now with making things look real, as in parts of “The Invaders.” This means he uses natural settings and lightings, and players, who if they can’t be natural don’t do anything, which mostly happens plus some not too glistening photography, composed brilliantly in dark and light, and you have the correct, undecorative decor for movie-making—what Hollywood will need when it cleans house—besides a commendable plainness.
But the furthest this movie gets emotionally is to note impersonally some striking views: the high-lighted flight of a night bomber across the land, the pastoral effect of children gathered in a sunlit glade, looking up at the fliers in the tree, and a complexity of noble-looking people. What must come finally in Powell’s pictures is some humanity, from either a closer examining of his people or from a closer examining of his essentially romantic ideas. His design is still to make a highly adventurous structure look utterly believable, and it still has a bolt missing. I suspect that, since Powell’s adventure lacks adventure and his realism is merely negative reporting, the very romantic structure of his pictures is an evasive device, a way of bowing both to realism and romanticism without actually meeting either. The overindulgence in beautiful still-life photography rather than the achievement of any kind of emotional vitality in terms of movement shows the same lack of coming to grips with his material. Still, he has logically left Leslie Howard and other anomalies of “The Invaders” behind, and has made a clean, handsome film.
Mr. Powell’s journey is rightly cast. Alongside of our own jobs, these British actors seem wonderful. The reason partly has to do with the fact we don’t see a British player like Hugh Williams so often as we see Don Ameche, nor do we hear that kind of accent. But beyond this, the British producers do not cast to rigid beauty patterns (compare the complexity of people in this with those in “Eagle Squadron”). Finally, their directors insist on cutting all the scenes that show an actress looking unnecessarily silly. I liked all the Dutch people, and Miss Googie Withers, who stood, in this picture, for indomitable Holland.
November 16, 1942