Craft of Comedy

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or: How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes. Filmed in England in 70-mm. Todd-AO and DeLuxe Color by spendthrift 20th Century-Fox (Cleopatra, The Sound of Music), this disarming comedy spectacular has the charm, spirit and easy-does-it amiability usually associated with movies made on a shoe string. Producer Stan Margulies and Director Ken Annakin, in lightsome homage to the birth of aviation, have sensibly squandered a good share of their budget on bamboo, catgut, glue, canvas and piano wire to reproduce an authentic, outlandish armada of vintage aircraft. These flaphappy contraptions include at least six flyable full-scale models, among them a facsimile of the plane in which France's Louis Bleriot made his historic 1909 flight across the English Channel from Calais to Dover.

Scrambling fact in a free-for-all of oldtime comedy styles, Magnificent Men invents a Great London-Paris Air Race in the year 1910. The competition, sponsored by British Publishing Tycoon Robert Morley, soon becomes a contest between a rugged U.S. barnstormer (Stuart Whitman) and an airborne English aristocrat (James Fox), each determined to win the day and the tycoon's daughter, Sarah Miles, precisely the sort of flibbertigibbet Josephine who might lose her heart--and through frequent entanglements, her hobble skirt--to a daring young man in a flying machine.

The daredeviltry of Sarah's gallant suitors is challenged by an unseemly horde of opponents, clearly selected as the aces least likely to get off the ground. Italy's representative (Alberto Sordi) brings along his large tearful family to witness every crash, while the Japanese entry (Yujiro Ishihara) pilots a loose assemblage of box kites driven by kamikaze impulses. The flyer in everyone's ointment is England's villainous Sir Percy (Terry-Thomas), who sends his man to saw away struts or detach landing gear on rival planes, a tactic that leads to many a droll mid-air crisis.

As in any comedy more than two hours long, some of the sight gags, chase sequences and romantic interludes add more weight than wit; and an aged running joke about German militarism threatens at moments to send the show into a nosedive. But the day is nearly always saved by an inspired stroke of slapstick, a device wielded with mighty effect by Gert Frobe as Germany's Colonel von Holstein. Frobe faces his French foe (Jean-Pierre Cassel) in a mad duel fought with blunderbusses from a pair of balloons bobbing above a drainage pond. The major casualty is Sordi, whose test flight propels him into their line of fire. Later, when Frobe attempts the channel, flying quite literally by the book, he somehow finds himself suspended at low altitude, treading water. This feat is matched by Terry-Thomas maladroit landing atop an express train bound for Paris--with a tunnel dead ahead.

In a film distinguished for airy good humor, the performances are all neatly off-center, and the setting catches the nostalgia of Ronald Searle's curlicued title designs. But beneath the thrills, spills and laughter of this farcical adventure lies a keen, almost wistful admiration for the great achievements of aviation's pioneers. Though the tone is mocking, the feeling is true. Those magnificent men, fluttering foolishly skyward, carry with them the fears and aspirations that humanity often perceives most clearly and with the greatest delight in the forlorn figure of a clown.

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