Flare Path to the Stars

The Way to the Stars is one of the finest war films of the last century. Scripted by Terence Rattigan and directed by Anthony Asquith, it was based on Flare Path, an immensely successful play also written by Rattigan and directed by Asquith that opened on August 13, 1942, at the Apollo Theatre when London was still under air attack. A note on the original program stated:

In the event of an Air Raid Warning an announcement will be made from the stage. Patrons are advised to remain in the Theatre, but those wishing to leave will be directed to the nearest official air raid shelter, after which the performance will be continued for as long as practicable.

In March this year, as part of the Rattigan centenary, Flare Path was revived at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in a new production directed by Trevor Nunn, and ran for two months. I was able to see it twice while I was in the UK researching my biography of Chester Wilmot. This gave me a unique insight into The Way to the Stars, long one of my favourite films; which is why this column begins with a theatre review of a production that unfortunately most of you won’t be able to see.

Flare Path was based on Rattigan’s experiences as a tailgunner in the RAF. He had joined up on the advice of his psychiatrist as a way of overcoming a bad case of writer’s block. Once in the forces not only did the playwright start writing again but according to contemporaries served with distinction; that is until the RAF decided Pilot Officer Rattigan was more useful writing propaganda films than flying in combat. Undoubtedly his superiors were influenced by the success of Flare Path, which ran for 679 performances and was praised by Winston Churchill as “a masterpiece of understatement”.

The play is very much of its time. The setting is the lounge of a hotel in Lincolnshire near an RAF base where the crews try to relax between their bombing raids on Germany. Peter Kyle, an ageing Hollywood film star, arrives to reclaim his former lover, Patricia Graham, also an actor. The problem is that she has married Flight Lieutenant Teddy Graham after a whirlwind courtship. Patricia is still in love with Peter and plans to leave Teddy but has yet to pluck up the courage to tell him. Her revelation is delayed by the announcement of a special bombing raid, “very hush hush”. One plane crashes on take-off after being strafed by a German fighter. The mission is a success, but an aircraft piloted by a Polish count serving with the RAF fails to return. He has sent out a distress signal but is presumed to have been lost at sea. Although Teddy has successfully piloted his plane back after being hit by anti-aircraft fire, the young pilot fears he has lost his nerve. Moved by his anguish, Patricia decides to stay. At first Peter refuses to accept this and threatens to tell Teddy about their affair. But after translating and reading a letter written in French (“as it would be easier to get translated”) by the Count to his wife, Doris, to be opened if he failed to return, Peter has a change of heart and leaves. Then the Count suddenly appears—he and his crew were able to make it to shore—and the play ends with a joyful celebration of their survival.

As Dan Reballato writes in the edition of Flare Path published in conjunction with the revival, the original audiences

had a strong affinity with the play because they were placed in precisely the same position as the characters in Act Two: listening for the offstage sounds of battle, waiting for news hoping for the best. On certain nights fictional news brought onstage by fictional characters would be interrupted by real news brought on by the backstage staff.

Wisely Trevor Nunn and his cast treated Flare Path as a period piece. Before the curtain there was a selection of music from the war years including songs by Vera Lynn (of course). The set was emphatically realistic and the suits, haircuts and uniforms were all authentically in period, as was Sienna Miller’s long blonde hair and elegantly cut dresses and slacks. Reportedly, for those who remembered the Blitz, the sound design for the take-offs and the crash was chillingly accurate and was made even more effective by the projections of planes above the stage that seemed to come straight at the audience.

But the production’s greatest achievement was its recreation of Rattigan’s theatre of understatement, where seemingly prosaic dialogue conveys a wealth of emotions. Teddy’s breakdown scene is justly famous—the first portrayal of the fear and anguish experienced by so many fliers to appear in any medium—and was superbly played by Miller and Harry Haddon-Paton. Even better was James Purefoy as Peter reading the Count’s letter to Sheridan Smith’s splendid Doris, with the actor covertly donning reading glasses. (This very truthful piece of “business” seems to have been devised by Purefoy himself. It is not in the text even though it is a very Rattigan touch.) The scene also counters the criticism often levelled at the playwright of condescending to his working-class characters. Certainly the idea of a former barmaid married to a Polish count who speaks fractured English would seem to be in the worst possible taste. But Rattigan not only makes Doris warmly likeable but invests the character with great dignity when we discover from the letter the depth of the Count’s love for her.

Throughout, Rattigan’s dialogue remains realistic. He had the best ear for middle-class speech, not to mention RAF slang, of any writer of the period. What’s more, Trevor Nunn’s sensitive production reveals that the play has a very rich sub-text and is far more open than it must have seemed in the 1940s. In spite of the rousing “happy ending”, criticised by, among others, Rattigan’s friend Noel Coward, the shadows remain and the characters’ futures are still dangerous and uncertain. 

Seeing this production twice in two weeks brought home to me how it was just these qualities that made Rattigan’s screenplay for The Way to the Stars so effective. His dialogue is ideal for what came to be known as stiff-upper-lip screen acting, where complex emotions are expressed between the lines or in the inflection of an individual response. The Way to the Stars, however, goes beyond the events of a single night. The narrative extends from 1940 to 1944. Like Flare Path it depicts the wartime experience of the RAF with scenes set mainly at the airfield—Halfpenny Field in the script—and the Red Lion Hotel in the local village where the fliers congregate. In addition the film was intended to promote Anglo-American friendship and to portray the interaction between British and US fliers. But by the time the film went into production in 1945 on locations in north Yorkshire it was clear the war would be over when it was released. So an opening sequence (later copied by Henry King for Twelve O Clock High) was filmed on a real deserted airfield with the camera moving through the control room and into the mess hall, capturing graffiti and objects left by the air and ground crews that are to be featured later, with the main story becoming a flashback

The film begins with the arrival at Halfpenny Field in 1940 of Peter Penrose (John Mills) a rookie pilot. No sooner has he arrived and been introduced to the CO, Squadron Leader Carter (Trevor Howard), than Carter is killed. David Archdale (Michael Redgrave), Peter’s room-mate and later close friend, becomes CO. He too is killed .When the Americans take over the airfield Peter, who has stayed on as Controller after his first tour of duty, becomes friends with a young American flier, Johnny Hollis (Douglass Montgomery). He too is killed.

These losses are accepted with a pain that is all the more moving for its restraint. Dominating the film is Michael Redgrave’s Archdale—one of the great authority figures in British war films. In a few economically written scenes Rattigan portrays him as a good friend and a compassionate leader. Most important of all Archdale is a secret poet, and “his” poems are used to express the theme of shared sacrifice. It is seen first in a beautifully understated scene when he recites these lines to his fiancée, Toddy (Rosamund John), the manageress of the Golden Lion: 

Less said the better,
the bill unpaid, dead letter.
No roses at the end
for Smith my friend.
Last words don’t matter,
for there are none to flatter.
Words will not fill the post
of Smith the ghost,
only son of loving mother;
the ocean stirred
leaving no word. 

Much more significant is the poem Toddy shows to Peter and later, Hollis, “For Johnny”: 

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground. 

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years. 

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star
To keep your head
And see his children fed. 

These poems were not written by Rattigan, even though they match his style exactly. They were by John Pudney, who was also in the RAF, serving at the time as a squadron intelligence officer in Cornwall. When the film appeared, “For Johnny” was modestly famous. Pudney had written the poem during an air raid in 1941 and it had been published in the Daily Chronicle.

The interaction between the Americans and the British is the source of most of the film’s quiet humour. Initially the US servicemen display all the brashness that according to the Mass Observation surveys the British found most offensive. Undoubtedly the original audiences relished the dry put-downs by the British characters while American viewers enjoyed exchanges like this:

Tinker Bell: (after ordering tea) They don’t warm the pot, you know, I’ve watched them making it.

Tiny Williams: Well it’s liquid and it’s warm. I was afraid they were going to abolish it altogether.

Tinker Bell: Oh they would have done, they were going to, if I myself had not protested to the Colonel.

Tiny Williams: Nobly done, Tinker Bell.

Once the US fliers go into action, however, they are treated as comrades. It is also implied that the Golden Lion and the village itself have become more relaxed because of the American influence. The very British Tiny Williams (Basil Radford)—a character taken over from Flare Path—even takes part in a baseball match.

Much of this probably came from the scenario prepared by Rattigan with writer-producer Anatole de Grunwald and Richard Sherman before Rattigan wrote the screenplay. According to Rattigan’s biographer, Michael Darlow, script conferences between de Grunwald, Rattigan and Anthony Asquith were quite hazardous, the two writers taking cover in the hallway from the buzz bombs while the director paced up and down oblivious to the danger.

Wisely the writers avoided the boring triangle love stories that are the bane of so many American and some British war films. Instead Archdale’s marriage to Toddy and Penrose’s romance with the demure Iris (Renee Asherson) are portrayed as an affirmation of life in spite of the ever present danger. Most interesting of all is the platonic romance between Johnny Hollis and Toddy. Superficially it is a very proper friendship. But Rattigan implies there is much more. For Toddy, Johnny partly fills the void left by David’s death. In a delicately played scene after Johnny is given the chance to go home when he is offered a training command and he talks about bringing his wife and children over after the war it is clear they really want to stay together. This is what motivates him to turn down the training command, as well as his belief that Americans having come into the war late should stay to the end. However, on his next mission Johnny is killed trying to land his B17 with a bomb jammed in the bomb bay door rather than bail out and risk having a ten-thousand-pound bomb go off in the village. He becomes “Johnny the bright star” in the poem.

The direction of the crash sequence, built round a series of reaction shots of Penrose, Williams and the American CO (Harley Power) watching from the control tower, intercut with a close-up of Johnny looking down at the bomb as he tries to land, followed by a mid-shot of the US colonel as he ducks to avoid the blast that shatters the glass behind him, demonstrates that Anthony Asquith was more than a superb director of theatrical adaptations. The Way to the Stars is of course beautifully played in a style that anticipates the director’s achievements in The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy. But Asquith could frame and shoot with the best of them, especially when working with cinematographers like Derrick Williams here, and later Freddie Young and Desmond Dickinson.

Rattigan and Asquith do not even come close to portraying the moral issues surrounding the strategic bomber offensive; but as Max Hastings, one of the severest critics of the policy, observed, “only a charlatan would seek to entangle the men who flew the aircraft in the strategic controversy”. British and American air crew suffered grievous losses in the air war over Germany. We can be grateful to Rattigan, Asquith and their splendid cast for creating so close to the events such a truthful portrayal of their sacrifice.

Neil McDonald writes: The text of Flare Path and DVDs of The Way to the Stars are available from the UK. The background to the making of the film comes from Jeffrey Richards’s chapter on The Way to the Stars in Britain Can Take It by Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards.