Reach for the Sky
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Written by Lewis Gilbert and Vernon Harris from a book by Paul Brickhill
1956/UK
The Rank Organization/Angel Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Equipment Officer: I’m sorry, the book says I must wait three months before I can initiate the procedure for hastening new issue.
Bader: Fine! We’ll send Goering a telegram, and ask him not to come over for *three months”![/box]
This inspirational movie about a couple of different kinds of courage is based on a true story.
The setting is England in the run-up to and during WWII. In the early 30’s Douglas Bader (Kenneth Moore) is sent to flight school for training as an RAF pilot. The brash young man is not strong on the academics but is a great sportsman and an able flyer. He gets into scrapes in which he crashes his car and finally crashes a plane doing unauthorized stunt flying. In this later accident, he loses both of his legs.
Thereafter he devotes himself to a full-time effort to walk again on tin prosthetic legs without a cane. He is proclaimed unfit to fly and leaves the RAF for a time. When WWII starts, the military takes a different attitude and Bader gets his wings back. He goes on to be a resourceful and courageous squadron leader.
Bader had a pilot’s arrogance, which tended to make his character annoying at times. Moore makes him sympathetic despite that and does very well with the physical challenges of the part. I found the film quite watchable.
Trailer
“Bader had a pilot’s arrogance, which tended to make his character at times.”…missing a word or phrase here?
Bit of a legend this fella and deservedly so, Moore’s portrayal was actually a toned down version of Bader, best described as a man with firm convictions and not shy to voice them, accepted or not. Moore does very well though to plant the seed in your mind that Bader has that “arrogance”, it is an excellent performance.
Wikipedia has a pretty good life story and the comments below this article (which was a bit overdone IMHO) pretty much sum up Bader and people’s attitude to him.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021757/A-flawed-hero-Douglas-Bader–brave-foolish-egomaniac-led-squadrons-few.html
The word was “annoying”. Thanks for the article. I’m glad they toned down Bader for the film. He sounds really unbearable!
I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever drives people who go way beyond the average usually means they are at least “difficult”, at worst, highly dangerous!
I think I’ve worked for some of them …
It’s Kenneth More not Kenneth Moore. How dull the world would be without “unbearable” men like Bader and 21 comments on the Daily Mail website is hardly a concensus of opinion. Perhaps before blindly following the pack you should research all the stuff he did behind the scenes for the disabled. Flawed he may have been in some ways but then again who isn’t?
Thanks for correcting my spelling error. I liked the movie and More’s performance. Don’t know what you mean by Daily Mail.