You could almost hear author Tom Wolfe laughing in his fine book The Right Stuff. Wolfe reported that when the future astronauts saw The Sound Barrier in 1952, they couldn’t believe their eyes and ears. David Lean’s movie declared an English test pilot to be the first to exceed the speed of sound, in a British jet the pilots knew was incapable of going that fast. Chuck Yeager held the honor of breaking the sound barrier five years before, in 1947 — but that fact remained Top Secret for several years. Although English aviation engineers did indeed make early strides in the development of jet technology, they ran a losing race against the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The Sound Barrier often gets discussed last in the filmography of David Lean, as it doesn’t fit well with his costume pictures or the four grand epics that occupied the last 25 years of his career. As the story is told through Ann Todd’s aviation wife character, it fits in better with his intimate dramas, three of which starred Ms. Todd.
The beautifully filmed movie can boast terrific aerial sequences. It’s a well-judged melodrama about the hazards of testing experimental aircraft, that takes pains to avoid emotional fireworks around fatal crashes. Ann Todd was often described as a cold actress but I think that’s because David Lean placed her in cold roles — a potential murderer in Madeleine and the stoic wife and mother in this picture. There’s a lot to like in The Sound Barrier — I’m fascinated by its blindly chauvinistic take on English aviation. These were years when England’s artists were asked to do whatever they could to help the economy. Were David Lean and Alexander Korda spinning a propaganda tale for Queen and country?
Cut by nine minutes and released as Breaking the Sound Barrier in America, the 1952 movie is an alternate history story in which British aviation leads the world. That’s unfortunate as the English were true jet pioneers. They were the first to come up with the concept of jet turbines and had some of the first jet aircraft flying. The English company BOAC inaugurated the first commercial jet service in 1952, the year of The Sound Barrier. But thanks to U.S. secrecy the film’s flying details are wildly inauthentic.
In Terence Rattigan’s original script, fictional aviation industrialist John Ridgefield (Ralph Richardson) is obsessed with the race to break the sound barrier. John’s son Christopher (Denholm Elliot of A Room with a View) dies trying to learn to fly, so desperate is he to win his father’s respect. Daughter Susan (Ann Todd) marries Tony Garthwaite (Nigel Patrick), an ex- RAF flier who becomes Ridgefield’s key test pilot very much to Susan’s displeasure. Competing aviation company de Havilland suffers a loss when Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. dies in a test flight. Tony pushes Ridgefield’s new jet close to the sound barrier, where the airframe buffets so badly some say the barrier is a wall in the sky that can’t be broken. Susan thinks it madness to risk lives in a race to be the first to fly Mach 1, but Tony and especially John feel that the effort is all-important. Tony recruits Philip Peel (John Justin of The Thief of Bagdad), an old flying buddy and even better pilot.
The exciting The Sound Barrier has a weird take on the role of family in society. The technocrat millionaire John Ridgefield is an overbearing bully. Yet the show endorses him as a moral visionary who sees beyond the limits of bourgeois values. The tycoon pushes his experts and pilots to extremes. Son Christopher would rather kill himself than say ‘no’ to John. Aviation is everything, and only the worthy can become knights of the air.
A woman’s place is to shut up and birth new pilots.
Looked at from the viewpoint of Ann Todd’s Susan, the movie has an oppressive attitude toward bourgeois ‘womanly values’ of family security. It’s definitely a sexist world in 1952. When Susan wants to move with Tony to a house of their own, John Ridgefield quashes the idea with an offhand remark. There’s no way she can assert control over her marriage or her family’s future. Two important men in Susan’s life are sacrificed to her father’s grand obsession. Poor Chris Ridgefield is barely in the ground when John and Tony are admiring a model of a new jet design. The setup is not quite as callous as the “Joe Who?” denial of death in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, but it’s close.
Even though Tony knows he isn’t the best man for the flight test he won’t disqualify himself because he feels he must hold up his end. He takes his jet into the sound barrier’s deadly buffet zone not really believing he can break it. Susan knows that objecting will do nothing even though she’s carrying Tony’s baby. She goes to movies when Tony is flying just to distract herself. That detail ought to be seen as pathetic.
This reaching for the sky business is presented as a boys’ game only, as if girls weren’t capable of the same ambitions. Women are just too ’emotional’ even though Susan is 100% SUL (Stiff Upper Lip). Big Emotions just aren’t proper, dear. Susan hasn’t anybody to reinforce her doubts — Philip Peel’s wife Jess (Dinah Sheridan of The Railway Children) is a half-ditz concerned only that Philip gets a raise in salary. At the finish she’s used for a weak joke.
Susan’s dilemma is finding a way to live in a techno-dynasty that she sees as a death cult. Feminists will not be happy that Susan eventually surrenders to the male prerogative. She forgives her father and accepts that his commitment to aviation progress is more important than individual human lives. In the final scene she seems ready to dedicate her baby boy to the same imperative.
The male heroes cannot be seen to have doubts about anything. In Terence Rattigan’s most theatrical scene John Ridgefield asks Susan if she really thinks he killed his ‘sons’ for nothing. He then regains his emotional footing and asks Susan ‘never to mention the subject again.’ It’s a cold idealism that appeals to technocrats and Ayn Rand zealots.
It all makes sense if…
Critics often discuss The Sound Barrier solely as an exercise in superior David Lean cinematics. But the one way it makes sense is as a science fiction film, a viewpoint that I first read about in John Baxter’s excellent book Science Fiction in the Cinema (A.S. Barnes, NY, 1969). Baxter:
“The Sound Barrier was one of the first films to offer the suggestion that a new technological society had been born, a group of people to whom emotional and social allegiances were of little importance.”
The film’s obsession to push the edge of the aviation envelope has a pure sci-fi core. Powerful David Lean visuals link the mastering of supersonic flight to an eventual conquest of the heavens, literally dissolving from jets in flight to a starry galaxy.
The visuals emphasize that science-fiction miracles are happening now (1952). The men eagerly play with models of the sleek, propeller-less craft. Tony is made curious by the scream of a jet engine coming from a secret research hangar. It’s an entirely new kind of propulsive engine. He’s enraptured by the sight of it on its test cradle… a moment comparable to our first glimpse of George Pal’s The Time Machine.
When Susan protests why anybody should care about breaking the sonic barrier, Philip patronizes her by saying that books once taught that the Earth was flat, but now we know better. That’s core ’50s sci-fi dialogue, as when a scientist in Invaders from Mars argues that we ought to believe in Martian mutants, because fifty years ago, nobody believed airplanes were possible.
As noted by John Baxter one beautiful sequence in particular expresses Sci-fi’s ‘sense of wonder.’ Tony takes Susan on a casual one-day outing in a jet plane — all the way to Cairo, Egypt. David Lean’s visuals show their jet streaking high above European capitals, the Alps and the ancient ruins of Greece. The techno-future is changing the relative importance of everything: the world’s physical barriers and past history no longer matter as much as they once did. Tony and Susan lunch in Cairo and take a commercial jet flight right back to London. The globe has shrunk to nothingness.
Wings Over the World.
The Sound Barrier is therefore science-fiction in theme. What it really does is restate a key premise in H.G. Wells’ gargantuan sci-fi talk-a-thon Things to Come, made only fourteen years before. Ralph Richardson and Ann Todd had key roles in that movie, coincidentally. The final episode in Things to Come takes place in 2036 when the toga-clad leaders are sending their children out to explore space, with the distinct possibility that they won’t survive. The young people are eager to sacrifice themselves to the new religion of Progress: man must conquer space and somebody has to put their life on the line. One of the most important speeches in Things to Come basically states that the modern techno-crusade “… didn’t eliminate death and danger, it only made death and danger worthwhile.”
When Susan relents and falls in with John Ridgefield’s idea that breaking the sound barrier is an essential quest, she’s really accepting her role in the new religion of techno-progress. The new world requires a new breed of man. Tony was noble yet lacked the full measure of ‘the Right Stuff.’ He wasn’t a college-trained engineer like Philip Peel. Tony had the courage but not the extra technical savvy that allows Philip to intuit his way through frightening mid-flight crises.
The final scene of The Sound Barrier even more closely parallels that of Things to Come. Both take place in observatories with telescopes, and both hold up a future promise of a peaceful, if perilous conquest of the universe. No mention of God in any of this, by the way: Ridgefield is at war with Creation using his “God-given weapons of imagination.” The movie starts with victory over the Nazis and finishes with the statement that the way to the future (and perhaps out of economic stagnation) is to conquer the air and then outer space. We must commit to more research, more avionics, more science, and more danger, to forever “slip the surly bonds of Earth.”
The Sound Barrier’s vision of the future is almost as cold and unyielding as H.G. Wells’. The world will be inherited by an elite new class composed of the best technicians and the finest specialists. Susan can only hope that her baby boy will have what it takes to compete in the Great Quest of the future.
Susan sets her baby down on the floor of the Ridgefield observatory, onto a photo of the craters of the moon. The visuals therefore suggest that her son might be the first man on the moon. This is visionary optimism, for sure. The aviation we see in The Sound Barrier is so advanced we might think that Great Britain is ready to begin a ‘Rocket Group’ project such as that run by the fictional Bernard Quatermass in the first and second Quatermass films. David Lean’s final image combines a telescope, a starry sky and an airplane model that looks like a spaceship from Destination Moon or Walt Disney in Space and Beyond. Thematically speaking The Sound Barrier links directly from Things to Come right to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The buffeting violence going through the sound barrier is a ‘thematic rhyme’ with Stanley Kubrick’s cosmic Star Gate.
David Lean can be counted on for excellent performances to support the main premise. The key word seems is restraint. Ralph Richardson understates all of John Ridgefield’s imperious gestures. Ann Todd ‘maintains an even strain’ far better than average wives in aviation movies. She’s especially serene when compared to Eleanor Parker’s frantic atom bomb missus in Above and Beyond from the same year. Dinah Sheridan gets featured billing with much less screen time than the great John Justin. This is possibly the best screen appearance for Nigel Patrick, who does well expressing enthusiasm for dicey tests (“Piece of cake!”) even as he repeatedly shows Susan that her wishes are low-priority compared to flying, dangerous experiments, her father’s ambitions, etc..
Other screwy technical observations about The Sound Barrier’s odd denial of facts both historical and scientific ….
Responding to my concern over ‘who broke the sound barrier first,’ advisor Gary Teetzel reminds me that American movies, especially war movies, often ascribed what were mainly British combat stories to American troops (Objective, Burma), and habitually inserted American heroes into all-Brit situations (The Great Escape). Much more recently, there was also the flap over the movie U-571 for rewriting a British naval incident that took place before America got into the war and turning it into an American story. Even the British Parliament and Tony Blair chimed in on the controversy. Hollywood has a pretty dismal track record of rewriting history to be all about America and Americans.
The Sound Barrier doesn’t announce that it is fiction, and instead begins by listing a number of real test pilots that contributed technical advice. Since Chuck Yeager’s 1947 supersonic flight in a rocket plane was not publicized, David Lean may honestly have believed that an English pilot had been the first to fly faster than the speed of sound. Could Lean have thought he was making honest speculative fiction?
According to Tom Wolfe, the U.S. test pilots were confused by Lean’s invention of a totally bogus technical detail, that the flying controls of an aircraft reverse themselves when the speed of sound is approached. One impossible-sounding detail appears to be true (thanks to a correction from John Hodson). In the opening scene Philip Peel puts his WW2 Spitfire into a steep dive and approaches the speed of sound. The airframe buffets violently like the later jets, and Peel barely pulls out of his dive. According to Wikipedia, the Supermarine Spitfire’s maximum speed was under 400 miles an hour. Yet the truth is that during the war, something exactly like this actually occurred. This BBC article explains it.
The two-seater jet flown by Tony and Susan fly could never go non-stop to Cairo without refueling. They return on competitor de Havilland’s Comet, the first commercial jet airliner. That aircraft went into service in 1952, the year of The Sound Barrier. Note that the Comet we see has square windows. The de Havilland establishment learned a hard lesson about airframes and metal fatigue when three Comets broke up in mid-flight and crashed in the space of one year. As part of the ‘fix’ for the flaw, the square windows were replaced with oval designs.
The dangerous effect of metal fatigue on high-stress airframes was predicted in 1951’s No Highway (in the Sky), the James Stewart thriller with Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich. Its source book was written by Nevil Shute, who was an aviation engineer by trade.
My father the Air Force aviator said that if a jet nosed into a soft field at high speed, it might indeed instantaneously bury most of itself below ground level — that scene isn’t an exaggeration. He also said that fliers never expected movies to be realistic on any level, or for that matter to be taken seriously at all. So The Sound Barrier would be given a pass because of its high quality.
Speaking of typical inauthenticity: a comparable Hollywood jet test pilot movie was WB’s Chain Lightning from 1950. It’s pretty clueless overall. The story of pilot Humphrey Bogart testing an unlikely-looking super plane is so generic, it could have been adapted from a script for a race car driver, or a newspaper editor for that matter.
