By Lee Pfeiffer
Twilight Time has released writer/director Ken Annakin's whimsical homage to the daredevils of early flight, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, as a limited edition (3,000 units) Blu-ray. Typical of Twilight Time releases, the transfer is gorgeous. The only previous attempt to do justice to this gorgeous-looking 1965 film was Fox's ancient laser disc edition. Annakin channeled his boyhood fascination with flying into something constructive: an ambitious, big-budget movie. He was not only a talented director of actors, but he could also direct traffic, too, as evidenced by his admirable work on such epic movies as The Longest Day and Battle of the Bulge. The story is set in 1910 England and finds Robert Morley as a pompous millionaire who offers a sizable sum for the first international flyer who can soar from London to Paris. The 22-mile Channel crossing is considered to be death-defying but nevertheless attracts fearless flyers from across the globe. Part of the fun in watching the film is in Annakin's good-natured tweaking of cultural stereotypes. The British are stiff traditionalists, the Frenchman is an inexhaustible lover, the manic Italian copes with Waltons-size family and nagging wife, the German is a humorless bureaucrat and the American a swaggering cowboy. Each of these daring young men has constructed his own aircraft and they make for a very erratic and often humorous sight. Yet, the claptrap creations manage to get into the air, though with decidedly mixed results. Annakin actually had these Rube Goldberg contraptions built from scratch and they actually did fly, resulting in some of the most spectacular aerial footage ever filmed. He is aided an abetted by a wonderful international cast. The leads are Stuart Whitman, James Fox and Sarah Miles, but the real fun comes from the spirited group of second bananas: Gert Frobe, Alberto Sordi, Terry-Thomas, Robert Morley, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Eric Sykes, Benny Hill and Red Skelton among them. The film boasts a marvelously catchy theme song and wonderful score by Ron Goodwin, as well as the creative titles sequence by artist Ronald Searle. The Blu-ray preserves the original intermission and provides a number of original trailers and TV spots as well as an informative commentary track by Annakin that has been salvaged from obscurity from the laser disc release. Julie Kirgo provides the informative liner notes in the accompanying, well-illustrated booklet.
They don't make aircraft like this any more and they certainly don't make enjoyable epics like this, either.
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