I managed to pick up the 1945 film The Way To The Stars this week on a second hand VHS tape, and watched it last night. Wow, what a great film.
It stars John Mills as a new pilot in 1940 straight from OTU who is posted to a Blenheim squadron, where initially Trevor Howard (in his first ever film) was the CO, and Michael Redgrave is his room mate who takes him under his wing. Other well known stars who appear are Bill owen (of Last of the Summer Wine Compo fame) as Mills’s air gunner, and the wonderful comic actor Stanley Holloway, among a large and great cast.
The other stars are the Bristol Blenheims, Hawker Hurricanes, and Douglas Bostons, not to mention the B-17 Flying Fortresses. There’s a scene where two Hurricanes fly low over the base, REAL low, in Ray Hanna style!
It’s nice to see the Blenheims and the Bostons get a bit of coverage. I’d never heard a Boston before, they sound quite odd actually. It’s also nice to see the light bomber squadrons getting the focus of this film too.
It covers the period of 1940 to 44, and revolves around the squadron and the station, plus the pub next door where the airmen unwind and find friendships and love with guests and the lady publican. There’s a little romance but nothing too soppy like a lot of these films, and it’s really refreshing in that regard.
In 1942 an American B-17 squadron arrived and eventually took over the station, and the pub. Just when you think the US pilot Johnny is going to strike up a romance, it turns out he’s a faithful husband and father, a genuinely likeable man, and is only interested in friendship with the lovely young widow publican.
It’s a very well written film, and I think one of the best of its type. There’s some great comedy, some well shot action, and some sadness. The airfield attack scene is amazing, very much in the spirit of Battle of Britain made 25 years later. Overall I think it’s a wonderful film. I’m very glad I bought it.
The only thing I picked up on is in the final scene there was a flagrant disregard of the black out regulations, Warden Hodges would have burts a blood vessel if he’d seen it.
I wonder which squadrons were used in the making of the film, and where the airfield was.
By: Propstrike - 29th January 2012 at 13:49
What did your online search come up with ?
”The nearby town of Shipley on their way to bomb a concentration of German barges across the Channel in Calais.
The Way To The Stars, an original screenplay by Terrence Rattigan (from a story by him and the film’s producer Anatole de Grunwald), takes place between 1940 and 1944.
One third of a million British men & women were killed during WWII & this film hit a nerve with British audiences at the time, making “The Way to the Stars” the most popular film of 1945.
The Way to the Stars was released in the States under the title “Johnny in the Clouds” with a running time of 87 minutes. The full length British version ran for 109 minutes.
The playwright and author Terence Rattigan, who had come across the station whilst he was attached to the RAF during the war, based his script for the film ‘The Way to The Stars’ (known in the USA as ‘Johnny in the Clouds’) on entirely fictitious events at Halfpenny Green airfield Worcestershire, now Staffordshire, 7 miles West of Wolverhampton, which in the film he called ‘Halfpenny Field.’
Originally the intention was to shoot some of the externals at Halfpenny Green airfield but when Two Cities began to make the film in 1945 the station was still operational, so nearby Wolverhampton Municipal Airport (then at Pendeford to the north of the town, today covered by a housing estate) was used instead. In the latter half of the film ‘Halfpenny Field’ is an operational station for both British aircraft & American B-17 s, an impossibility for the real Halfpenny Green because the runways were too short. If squadron markings on the Flying Fortresses are any indication it would seem that the film footage of planes taking off and landing, apparently shot during April and May 1945, was made at the 348 BG base at Grafton-Underwood, in Northamptonshire, which was an actual combat unit at the time.
With the end of the war in Europe Halfpenny Green’s role as a beam-landing training school came to an end and on a cold grey afternoon in December 1945 the last Bedford five-ton lorry rumbled out of the gates. No. 3
(Observer) Advanced Flying Unit was officially disbanded on December 11th.”
http://www.plane-crazy.net/movies/31.htm
”Filming Locations:
Halfpenny field
LOCATION:
RAF Catterick (now Marne barracks) –
Catterick,
North Yorkshire
Market square with cross
LOCATION:
The market place –
Bedale,
North Yorkshire
The local pub
LOCATION:
Golden Lion Hotel
114 High Street,
Northallerton,
North Yorkshire
The US Army Air Force base
LOCATION:
Constable Burton Hall –
Constable Burton,
North Yorkshire
http://www.ukonscreen.com/jedjebb-The-Way-To-The-Stars-(1945).html
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August 26, 2010 at 5:23 am