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The film opens during the Battle of Britain. Mitchell's former test pilot (David Niven), now a wing commander, tells the story of Mitchell's working life to a group of flyers as they wait for the order to "scramble" into action. Retiring, publicity-hating Reginald Mitchell was no flyer. He was in every sense an artist, whose struggles and triumphs had a solitary character. As a study and an appreciation of that kind of man and that kind of service—which usually lies forgotten for a generation—this film comes notably soon. Mitchell had to fight official inertia and conventionality. He sacrificed health and, in the long run, life. He did not live to see his patient, advanced intelligence vindicated above the English Channel. Not even when his planes were winning Schneider Trophies (they won four) did England's financiers realize his full value. Not even after his eye-opening visit to Germany in 1935 and his meeting with the brilliant Willy Messerschmitt would the British Government lend him its ear. It was an "eccentric" individualist, Lady Houston, who finally put £100,000 behind Mitchell's fantastic notion that England desperately needed a plane "faster than anything on earth, tougher than any other fighter, and able to turn on a sixpence."
Mitchell had a year to live, doctors assured him, unless he quit working. He used the year in incessant work, in which his test pilot faithfully collaborated and to which his wife as faithfully submitted. When he died in the summer of 1937, of actual exhaustion, his imagination and perseverance had shaped to gull-like finality the fastest and finest fighter plane in existence. The film closes with some . hair-raising shots of the kind of Spitfire action the designer never saw.
Spitfire is in no way a slick, machine-turned production; it has, on the contrary, a virtue uncommon in contemporary films—the look and texture of the lovingly handmade article. It has also the quiet discretion that always distinguished Leslie Howard as an actor. He is well supported by Rosamund John and David Niven, who delicately suggest the subtle interdependencies which may develop between a mature woman, a man of vision and a man of action.
Good shot: cut into the picture's fighting climax, a scene of actual air combat. As an enemy plane swings into the camera's view, audiences may trace for themselves the effect of well-aimed English gunfire before the wounded Nazi swerves out of sight.
*Soviet films used to reach only a few big U.S. cities; now the chances are better. Moscow Strikes Back has played some 3,500 U.S. theaters. The average U.S. film plays around 12,000. *On battle performance the best fighter plane in World War II.