Be warned by my lot—which I know you will not

[sovay]

On the one hand, Sergei Nolbandov's Ships with Wings (1941) is easily the least of the films I have watched for John Clements. Any suggestion of documentary realism in the extensive location shooting aboard HMS Ark Royal is sunk as conclusively as the real-life aircraft carrier by the plot which meanders around the drawing room until it catapults into a sort of boy's own revision of the Battle of Taranto, somehow misplacing in the process almost all of the melodramatic potential of a daredevil playboy of a naval lieutenant disgracing himself out of the Fleet Air Arm and fetching up as the commercial pilot of an airdot in the Med conveniently situated for the convergence of German spies and his old comrades-in-flight. The female characters are motivational coupons. I don't care how much I like Michael Wilding or how much fun it is to see Michael Rennie playing human, I already watched Clements sacrifice himself once for the war effort and I thought it was stupid then. On the other hand, I have discovered that the actor could sing: he accompanies himself, first on the ukulele, later on the piano, on a selection of verses from Kipling's "The Ladies." He has a nice ironical light comedy voice, such that I was not at all surprised to read of his success in a 1945 revival of Private Lives. I didn't recognize the setting, although I guessed it was extra-diegetically popular; it turned out to be Frank Crumit's, from 1928. Elsie Bambridge is credited in the opening titles with permitting the use of the lyrics. In the course of establishing these facts, I have of course learned the damn song by sheer exposure and am now stuck with it after years of not much caring for the original poem even when set by Peter Bellamy. I am also now vaguely looking for the original cast recording of Robert and Elizabeth, otherwise known as Ron Grainer's 1964 musical version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, an improbable enough object even before adding Keith Michell. I may be working my way around to rewatching The Four Feathers (1939) in self-defense. Or experimenting with further titles off the available free Roku if I can endure the ads. Anyway, despite a solid cast, some startling violence, and a whole lot of vintage aircraft, I continue to prefer Ealing's weirder propaganda. There is considerable model work in Ships with Wings, especially around the dam-busting climax, and I suppose some of it is nice.