THE SOUND BARRIER

I’m not at all interested in the pioneering efforts of test pilots to fly at or above the speed of sound, so could director David Lean and writer Terrence Rattigan create a drama that would hold my interest?

The answer was ‘yes’, just about.

The two main characters are John Ridgefield (Ralph Richardson) and his daughter Susan (Anne Todd).  An ex-pilot, he now owns an aviation company, and is obsessed with building the first plane to break the 'sound barrier'.

In an early and suspenseful scene, his son Christopher (a very young Denholm Elliott) dies on his first solo flight. He was simply trying to live up to his father’s expectations, and his death casts a shadow over the relationship between father and daughter, since she can’t help blaming him for her brother’s death.

To make matters worse Susan is married to Tony, her father’s leading test pilot. Given the inherent danger in trying to break the sound barrier she questions the whole point of the endeavour, leading to some interesting discussions between father and daughter about whether human life is a price worth paying for progress and the expansion of human knowledge. 

At one point she even asks whether being able to fly to New York in two hours is a goal worth dying for, a pertinent question given the eventual commercial failure of Concorde. 

Maybe it’s a bit too on-the-nose, but the company’s latest jet plane is named Prometheus, after the Greek god who suffered eternal punishment for the crime of giving the secret of fire to mankind.

By the end of the film Susan has come around to her father's way of thinking and they are reconciled.  Fair enough, but it’s unfortunate that their debate is presented here in very polarised gender terms. It’s a film where it is men who are doing the heroic striving whilst women are confined to being no more than mothers and housewives.

Before we get to that reconciliation there’s some drama to get through. 

Tony is played by Nigel Patrick, who was a popular leading man in the forties and fifties.  On the evidence of the film it’s hard to see why, he comes across as awfully dull, but maybe that’s just the way Tony has to be portrayed.   

When the company's chief designer indicates that Tony might be a bit lacking in brains and imagination we know his days are numbered, and sure enough he crashes spectacularly to his death soon after. 

But he is replaced by someone with a bit more upstairs, who does succeed - hooray!

Given that Lean does a good job of giving the film a documentary feel, I was a little disappointed to learn afterwards that it was the US pilot Chuck Yeager who in 1947 first broke the sound barrier, and that he didn't find this film very accurate.  Never mind, I enjoyed the aerial sequences of jets, which have a kind of balletic beauty to them.  

This is the third film I've seen featuring Ralph Richardson (the others being 'The Four Feathers' and 'Outcast of the Islands') and in all cases he plays a somewhat distant and unsympathetic character but he undoubtedly has screen presence.  Together with Anne Todd, who turns in an excellent performance for her husband Lean, he manages to imbue this thin story with sufficient dramatic heft to keep me entertained.