The Sound Barrier (1952) David Lean, The Showman with Substance? (Review)

Despite being a hit on its 1952 release, The Sound Barrier is now one of the least-seen of David Lean’s films.  A shame, as it represents an artist in the middle of a fascinating transition.  Released just five years before The Bridge on the River Kwai, its daring spectacle points the way ahead to the grand-scale epics Lean made in the second half of his career.  Yet Lean is also continuing the working methods he established as far back as his debut, In Which We Serve (co-directed with Noël Coward).  Like that film, The Sound Barrier’s script filters Lean’s intensive research through the work of one of his era’s greatest playwrights – this time Terence Rattigan.  The result is a tender, romantic pocket-sized epic about an event that changed history.

The duality of The Sound Barrier is evident from the first shot, where cinematographer Jack Hildyard pans from the unimprovably English image of the White Cliffs of Dover in summer to the swastika on the tail of a crashed German airplane.  The opening credits, featuring skin-tingling aerial photography that would have made Howard Hughes even crazier with envy, list the models of planes used alongside the cast and crew – rightly so, as they’re among the film’s star turns.  Rattigan makes light work of explaining what the sound barrier is (and why “sound barrier” is a misnomer – it’s really about forcing your way past air), and Lean finds his own way of filming jet engines and hardware that isn’t indebted to Lang, Vertov or any of cinema’s previous artists of heavy industry.

Not that The Sound Barrier should be mistaken for a documentary.  There is only one minor American character, and he’s not Chuck Yeager, the pilot who actually was the first to break the sound barrier.  Yeager records in his autobiography that he found the film entertaining but completely fictitious – so what was in the 300-page dossier of research Lean gave Rattigan?  What seems to have exercised the two men was the chance to create a roman à clef around the story of Geoffrey de Havilland, the aviation tycoon whose son Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. died in a plane crash while trying to break the sound barrier.

Lean and Rattigan’s de Havilland figure is John Ridgefield, played with delicacy and skill by Ralph Richardson, and his ill-fated test pilot is a son-in-law (Tony Garthwaite, played by Nigel Patrick) rather than a son.  This gives the opening the teasing feel of a Daphne du Maurier-style Gothic melodrama; just what is the ominous rising, droning sound Garthwaite hears coming from his father’s workshop?  London Films’s sound recording is a crucial part of the narrative throughout, particularly in a test flight which cuts, nerve-wrackingly, from quiet shots of people observing the plane dipping and swooping around in the distance to close-ups of the pilot, his face rippling from the G-force, the engines howling like a chainsaw.  It’s a sequence worthy of Hitchcock.

As he often did, Rattigan finds the emotional crux of the story in a woman, Susan Garthwaite.  Played by Lean’s wife Ann Todd, Susan finds herself torn between her husband and her father, and her desire not to see her husband die understandably wins out.  Susan finds her father’s motives for risking so much in the pursuit of supersonic flight incomprehensible, but viewers today might side with him a little more.  Ridgefield makes brief mention of the commercial applications of his revolutionary engines, but mostly he thinks it should be done because scientific progress is a good thing in and of itself, that as soon as humanity finds itself capable of overcoming a new boundary it should do it.  Coming in a decade where most film portrayals of scientists had the word “mad” preceding their job title, that’s a stirringly positive vision of scientific progress, and one that should delight modern audiences.

It is, ultimately, Ridgefield’s worldview that wins out over his daughter’s.  The Sound Barrier gives its due to Susan’s anguish but it ultimately represents Rattigan working in a much lighter, sunnier register than usual, as well as showing Lean at the outset of his career as a showman with substance.  It is an extraordinarily pleasurable film, as enjoyable in its gripping airborne sequences as it is luxuriating in Rattigan’s snappy, quotable dialogue.  However it may have lost the audience it enjoyed on release, it deserves rediscovery on this Studiocanal Blu-Ray.

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