Out of the Clouds – 1955 | 88 mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Out of the Clouds, directed by Basil Dearden, was yet another of Ealing’s attempts at a behind the scenes approach – this time an anatomy of London Airport, a much smaller community in the mid-Fifties than now. Compared with Arthur Hailey’s treatment of the same formula in the Sixties in his novel Airport, the result is remarkably tame. As is usual in such Ealing pictures, and in this one more than most, the background and setting are more interesting than the foreground characters, and Paul Beeson’s EastmanColour photography provides a fascinating record of how Heathrow looked in its early days.

The films characters include Gus Randall (Anthony Steel), a pilot with a chronic (and potentially fatal) gambling weakness; chief duty officer Nick Milbourne (Robert Beatty), who yearns to be a pilot himself; American engineer Bill (David Lorenz), who finds romance in the form of Jewish girl Leah (Margo Lorenz); and Captain Brent (James Robertson Justice), whose doubts about a new aircraft prove to be well-founded. The obligatory romantic triangle involves Gus, Nick and airline – hostess Penny Henson (Eunice Gayson).

One of Ealing’s largest-ever sets was used for the interior of the terminal. The script, by Michael Relph and John Eldridge, is larded with the customary parade of minor characters – a comic cab driver a difficult passenger and so on – but so much of the original spirit has by this time deserted Ealing that the peripheral action, far from filling out a rich tapestry of incident, is merely a tiresome diversion from the main thread of the narrative.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.