To its credit, "The Battle of Britain" eliminates this scene. But it catalogs all the others: The pilot staring moodily out the hotel window while his girl looks pensive on the bed; Churchill, represented by a cigar; the Kid who gets killed on his first mission; the brave little Red Cross nurse; the outcast officer whose early warnings are vindicated; the officious German general; the Nazi pilots drinking champagne while the harried British gulp tea and make repairs. And interminable shots of airplanes being shot down.
The airplanes are another sore point. Sure, Harry Saltzman spent millions to assemble and repair Spitfires and Hurricanes, and there was even a TV special about the authenticity of the movie. But you've got to USE airplanes; it isn't enough to own them. Some of the aerial photography is very good. We see dogfights actually filmed in the air and fought by real planes (instead of by models and visual effects).
But the aerial scenes are allowed to run forever and repeat themselves shamelessly, until we're sure we saw that same Heinkel dive into the sea (sorry -- the "drink") three times already. And the special effects aren't all that good for a movie that cost $12,000,000.
For example: We see hundreds of German bombers, row after row, thundering across the sky to bomb London. But every one of the bombers moves at precisely the same speed, There's no relative change in position, or correcting for altitude. Nobody even dips a wing. The Germans were good, but they weren't that good.
And so the scene looks fishy, and we figure out we're looking at models. No progress has been made since that notorious scene in "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), where the Dunkirk fleet churned across the English Channel at exactly the same speed (rowboats, gunboats, it didn't matter) and you realized they were being towed through a tank on the same string.
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