First Light - dissatisfied customer
The book is brilliant. The best thing about the film was Wellum's voice-over.
Nor being old enough to know how it was then, but old enough to be a boring old, I thought the docudrama was a failure. Treadigraph refers in a kindly way to the tight budget. The credits went too fast to be sure, but I could see no sign of a military/flying advisor which I think the makers ought to have considered and must have deemed too expensive.
So many solecisms. The one that really registered with me was in a short scene where our hero is in the rain talking to another pilot. Behind them is a deserted Spitfire with the canopy right back. That would have been unthinkable in 1941 – no erks ? no cockpit covers ? By the time the film is being made, that aircraft has become fantastically expensive. So our minds go straight to the figure just off camera holding the hosepipe over the actors - and the dramatic thread is lost.
Did I say “dramatic thread” ? The film-maker was simply making the wrong film. All the squadron scenes seemed to have a dreary sepia wash and their actors seemed to be on Mogadon. Our hero usually looked as if he had just been fondled by the captain of his school’s First XV and he did not know what to do about it. The film-maker did not understand that the fear and the introversion, that Wellum described so well, was a subtext to the brightness and aggression essential to a top-scoring fighter squadron.
Was it class prejudice that had him keep our hero dependent on and just a little bit subservient to his ground crew ? It was as if our view of the soppy toff hero needed to be grounded on “real” people.
The love story was just a waste of time, a case of the film-maker being too unimaginative to leave it out or to understand why Wellum effectively left it out of his book. It went on long enough for some “dramatic tension” to develop - as to whether or not the film-maker was about to be crass enough to give us a full-blown sex scene.
It seems to me unlikely that the film-maker read the book. How otherwise does he get so wrong the scene where our hero’s father expresses his pride in his son ? Never mind that the sepia returned, to make the boy’s overstocked bedroom look as if it had not seen daylight for a hundred years. The proud father is played as a bewildered retired tobacconist or someone equally dreary. My paper-back has a photo that tells a much happier story, of two men in uniform proud of themselves and of each other.
That same photo shows Wellum in August 1941 as a Flight Lieutenant, naturally, as he has been flying for two years or so and was still alive. If there had been a service adviser, our hero would not have retained his Pilot Officer’s braid throughout the film.
If the film-maker was short of money, I hope he did not spend much on the full colour flying scenes. Some of it was just lovely, some of it was deliberately bewildering, but scarcely any of it was netted into the docudrama or properly explained. There was so much that the viewer could have learned from this film and did not, and which Wellum explained so graphically in his text.
For me, the film would have been ten times as good if it had really reconstructed the set piece story called Chapter 9 “Convoy Pair” and done nothing else.
Even what the film-maker did give us would have been much more coherent and satisfying if he had just let Wellum read his story and edited the pictures to match.