The Way to the Stars (1945)

the leading man is my tpye

Too much of everything

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Interesting, but yet slow moving British drama dealing with an airbase and accompanying inn during World War 11.Toddy, the innkeeper, has the misfortune to lose her husband, leaving her with the inn to manage and an infant. She then becomes friendly with an American flyer, and while there is nothing to indicate that she'd break up his marriage, she had a deep admiration for him and then tragedy strikes again.The writer of this movie, Terence Ratigan, seems to have a fetish with inns, innkeepers and dominant mothers and daughters as we saw years later in the memorable "Separate Tables." We certainly have elements of that film again in the guise of a domineering aunt who smothers her niece, the latter looking for love with flyer John Mills.The picture, nicely done, deals with both American and British flyers at the base.

Michael Redgrave and John Mills star in this British production about the RAF in wartime Great Britain, the men who serve there and the women who love them. Redgrave plays a Royal Air Force squadron leader and Mills is the new man assigned to him. In the early days of the Battle Of Britain new men were rushed right into combat and given a lot of on the job training. If the training was right it was a simple test, pilots and their crews lived to fight another day. Mills is a bit full of himself at first, but he straightens out soon enough under Redgrave's tutelage.The title Johnny In The Clouds comes from an airman's simple poem said over dead comrades. It's something that Redgrave found and it's brief, but eloquent. It's not usual for one of the leads to get killed halfway through the film, but Redgrave is remembered throughout the movie. His wife and later widow is Rosamund John who gets a few people sniffing around after Redgrave's demise, including Mills. He later gets interested in Renee Asherson, but she's under the heel of a domineering spinster aunt played by Joyce Carey. As for John, when America enters the war and our Army Air Corps comes in and takes over in large measure from the RAF, John gets interested in American flier Douglass Montgomery. Stanley Holloway is in the film lending his usual good cheer in any movie he's in. And in a brief role you can spot Jean Simmons as a singer, maybe a harbinger of what she did in Guys And Dolls where she also sang. Look also for Trevor Howard in a bit part.Johnny In The Clouds is not a war film in the truest sense because there are no aerial combat sequences. It's a romantic film set during World War II and it came out after the outcome was in the bag. Everyone is in the best stiff upper lip tradition of the British people and as a romance Johnny In The Clouds still holds up well today.

Excellent wartime film, designed as propaganda, but so well-made that it's a lasting British classic. John Mills and Michael Redgrave star as the fliers who become firm friends. We are let into their lives and loves and it's a warm film that feels genuine. Like the trial scene in Powell & Pressburger's magical "A Matter Of Life And Death" director Anthony Asquith also has something to stay about British-American relations during WW2, finding humour in the differences yet also heart. Mills may slip under people's radar because he's always so quiet and efficient, Redgrave is magnetic on screen. Very well edited and shot, it's one you must check out.

This is one of those 'period' films replete with the kind of dialogue that we've heard 'sent up' a thousand times and responded to the send ups by laughing at them but this film that SHOULD be faintly risible holds the attention and inspires tears rather than laughter. This is probably because it is as finely crafted as a Faberge egg or a Louis VIII commode. The screenplay is the work of Terence Rattigan, one of the finest English playwrights of the 20th century - indeed even a cursory glance at the relationship between Joyce Cary and her niece Renee Asherson reveals a blueprint for the Mrs Railton-Bell and daughter Sybil in Rattigan's Separate Tables which lay a good ten years in the future - who could and did turn his hand to the screenplay usually successfully as in The Sound Barrier. Michael Redgrave, destined to star magnificently in Rattigan's The Browning Version (directed, as here, by Puffin Asquith)stands out as the dashing and charming pilot who disappears far too soon having flown without his 'lucky' lighter and gone down in flames. Rattigan's strength as a writer of wartime drama is in concentrating on the people rather than the battles so that the planes are seen taking off and landing at Halfpenny Field and that is all. The ensemble cast complement each other perfectly from John Mills raw recruit maturing into a leader to Stanley Holloway's hotel bore. One of the finest of its kind.