Touches You

Best movie ever!

Absolutely Fantastic

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Americans often say to us Brits "Well, we saved your asses in the war!" Well here's a movie that shows that whilst the US did later help us save Europe, we had saved our own arses 18 months before Pearl Harbor, thank you very much. Having said that, it's a shame that 52% that voted Brexit seem to have forgotten that we couldn't have done it without the crucial help of the Polish/Czech refugee airmen flying in RAF uniform.A well made, well researched, historically accurate (apart from the lack of Hawker Hurricanes - a purely logistical issue due to lack of surviving examples in 1969) war film in the vein of The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far with possibly the best depiction of WWII aerial combat ever put on film. This film should have pride of place in all movie buff's collections.

With a budget in the region of £149m in today's money, Battle of Britain was a huge production with a galaxy of international stars. The aerial sequences are riveting, the action compelling. There isn't a great deal of character development and it is flat in parts, and the score is platitudinous, but this is a copper-bottom action film and Guy Hamilton was an accomplished technician and the man to turn to in this genre in the early 1970s. There's no getting away from the telling of events as they occurred and they had to honour the real pilots and ground staff who gave their lives to the cause, so it's laden with acton. The film is generally faithful to real events and it has a relatively upbeat tone given the subject matter which I suppose helps due to its 2hs 13mins length. No epic retellings should be of shorter duration. I'd avoided watching the film for years, probably because of what I 'd perceived as a grainy film stock but recent releases improve the quality and even so, I now think the dated feel adds to the spectacle.

So everyone else's comments, yes. But how about the funny bits? "Repeat please?" "Private polish chit chat", and "thanks awfully, old man", oh, and "get your hands up you Nazi bastard"Then there's the special effects. Obviously there's the explosions apparently achieved by scratching the negative. And of course the fishing line on the Stuka crashing into the chain home station. But my two favorites are the attack on the French airfield and the he 111 with the dangling string. In the airfield sequence, there's a strafing sequence when one Me comes straight at the camera, hurricane explodes, another me goes right to left, but the charges meant to show staging fire are reversed, so as the approaching me fires, the crossing charges fire, and so on.Then there's the he 111 with the tether. So they got a great shot of the large scale model 111 plunging into the channel, but the tether is still attached to the model for some reason? So they add in a shot of "control cables" snapping, to explain!

Despite what the title suggests, this is not really a film about the Battle of Britain. While it follows the basic plot of the Battle, and features various public-domain characters like Hugh Dowding and Adolf Hitler, it's primarily a series of expensive air battles strung together with expository dialogue. If you like that sort of thing, it's a fine movie.The fleet of vintage aircraft assembled for the picture is impressive, even though armchair historians will happily point out the sundry inaccuracies: for example, all the German aircraft in the film are actually Spanish Air Force planes fitted with British Rolls-Royce engines -- the same ones the British Spitfires and Hurricanes had. Many of the Spitfires are later marques, and there are several types absent from the German air force. (Displaying an appalling lack of foresight, most air forces scrapped their fighters and bombers at the end of the war so they could start building jets instead, causing endless frustration for future generations of film-makers.) Despite all that, this is one of the few movies to get anywhere near the reality of 1940 with its skies full of planes.The non-flying scenes act as a tribute to the Royal Air Force and, to a lesser extent, the people of England who lived through the Blitz. A-list actors like Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, and Christopher Plummer play the stalwart heroes with a minimum of characterization that ensures they will remain largely symbolic: they're figureheads rather than fictional characters. On the one hand this robs the film of human interest; on the other hand, it also avoids distracting the audience with unnecessary melodrama.The air battles are vividly choreographed and set to stirring martial music, mostly by Ron Goodwin, but with a cameo from Sir William Walton for the climax. Compared to "Tora! Tora! Tora!" -- 1970's cinematic assault on Pearl Harbor -- "The Battle of Britain" is slightly less elaborate but ultimately more satisfying. It's easier to make an exciting action movie when the good guys win, after all.