Reach for the Sky (1956)

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While perhaps too long, but just a tad, Reach for the Sky is a very compelling, moving and inspiring movie, that treats its subject matter with dignity. The story is always compelling and paced very nicely, the music is stirring, the dialogue is thoughtful with a bit of humour, the film is wonderfully made with beautiful cinematography, costumes, sets and scenery and Bader at the end despite any faults character-wise he has is one to take inspiration from. Gilbert's direction is masterful, seamlessly making the drama equally as good as the action sequences, and I think Bader is Kenneth More's best ever performance, he is just marvellous. All in all, compelling, beautifully shot and just not a movie to miss really. 9/10 Bethany Cox

If you've read this far, then you've got a good grip on the plot and basics. I'd just like to add that this film helped me through a semi-crippling bone disease, couple of years around 1957/9, so I'm among the legions of similar crips who have much to thank Bader and More for. Seriously.However, time and history have been unkind. Without boring all with the story, let me just remark that Bader's charity off-screen was very conditional and snobby-Christian/lodge based. Further, I later got to know the Dowding family quite well for a while, where his name was mud. A whole political Pandora's box of nastiness hung on the 'big wing' theory (which didn't actually work in the end), and Bader was the thin end of the wedge that split Dowding so rudely and inappropriately away from the position he had filled with such honour and restraint.There's another film in there, now they're all dead, with much to say of the folly of letting heroes near politics, or front-line whizz-kids near strategy.

A cynic would argue that the producers made it difficult to say anything negative about a film that recounts a seventeen year period in the life of a man lauded as a hero and who was still very much alive when it was made. Although he'd been a jobbing actor for several years Kenneth More finally achieved stardom in the theatre in the role of Freddy Page, an ex-Battle of Britain pilot who finds it hard to adjust to civilian life. The play, which opened in 1952, was Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea and More went on to recreate his role in the film version albeit opposite Vivien Leigh rather than Peggy Ashcroft. It was, then, something of type-casting to give him the role of Douglas Bader, a pilot who lost both legs in 1931 yet went on to lead five squadrons in The Battle Of Britain. It is, inevitably, a feelgood movie and Lewis Gilbert surrounds More with a cast of rock-solid dependables of the British film industry and on the whole turns out a decent enough film.

While this may seem 'corny' to some people, this movie instills hope, courage and determination for anyone old enough to understand the concept. To overcome such obstacles, to persue their beliefs/ convictions are lessons to all of us, not just the disabled. Kenneth More is outstanding in the leading role, although I did think that his dog was rather cute. (husband nods disaprovingly).