The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" opens with the announcement of the execution of Dutch civilians by the occupying Germans for aiding the escape of a British airman shot down over Europe. The film then jumps to the crew of Vickers Wellington 'B for Bertie' as they prepare for a bombing run on Stuttgart. The bomber is brought down by German anti-aircraft artillery and the rest of the film follows the crew as they try to escape occupied Europe with the aid of the Dutch underground. The movie is strictly 'vérité', the acting is minimal and realistic, and there is no score. Clearly a 'propaganda' film, the British crew and the Dutch are heroic and resourceful, while the Germans are somewhat incompetent – but that's all part of war-time cinema and does not detract from the overall excellence of the production (especially the special effects used for the bombing raid and the crash of the bomber). The film didn't really benefit from the bit of fisticuffs toward the end but the tough Dutch woman's comments about what to do with the KO'ed Germans suggests some off-screen extra-judicial killing that the movie, regardless of the situation on the home front, would never 'condone'. Overall, a great film from both an entertainment and a historical perspective.

Once again the Archers come through with a very entertaining picture. I think the film would be much more pertinent to, and was probably aimed at, WWII British audiences, but it is nevertheless top quality motion picture entertainment for either side of the Atlantic.Although it starts out in a different vein than most - A British bomber flying unmanned until it crashes - there is surprisingly little action for a war picture and is mainly a character study about the airmen who bailed out of her. All parts are professionally done, especially Bernard Miles' and Godfrey Tearle's, and special mention must go to Googie Withers who labored in movies all those years with a funny name. It is she who takes acting honors in this one as the 'contact' posing as a Nazi sympathizer.The World War II conflict in the European theater has provided an endless supply of thrilling and exciting movies with the Nazis as the natural 'bad guys', and here is another. Although they were not all as dim-witted as portrayed in movies, it is always fun to watch them come out on the short end. This film is well worth your time whether you are a war movie buff or not.

Following up on their first three collaborative successes ("The Spy in Black," "Contraband," and "The 49th Parallel"), director Michael Powell and scenarist Emeric Pressburger formed their own production company, The Archers, and "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" (1942) was the firm's first project. This World War II-drama is a clever reworking of "The 49th Parallel" (1941), a story of six German sailors marooned in Canada when their submarine is bombed by Allied pilots; the rest of the movie depicted their attempts to cross over into then-neutral U.S of A. This time around, in "One of Our Aircraft...," the heroes are six members of a British RAF bombing crew. We watch as they take off for the Continent one evening on a bombing raid and sample their conversation before they reach the target. After dropping their bombs on a Stuttgart industrial plant, their Wellington aircraft suffers a direct hit from German flak. The crippled airplane flies as far as Nazi-occupied Holland before the crew decide to bail. The rest of the film chronicles their efforts to return to England while avoiding capture, with the assistance of various Dutch civilians. Just as "The 49th Parallel" was Powell's wartime love-letter to Canada, "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" serves the same purposes for his locale here – the Netherlands. The film opens with a close-up of a document, signed by leaders of the Dutch government-in-exile, informing us of the names of a half-dozen Dutch citizens who were caught, tried, and executed for performing acts against Germany's Occupation Forces – i.e., helping downed Allied fliers return to their bases in England. This visual device, the close-up of official paperwork, is repeated throughout the film. At certain intervals between episodes, Powell fills the screen with other documents and examples of bureaucratic red tape – mostly applications to Nazi officialdom by the Dutch, asking permission for such mundane matters as attending churches, visiting relatives in other villages, viewing football(soccer) matches. Off- screen, we hear the rude commentary of a German Commandant as he stamps his reluctant approval on each application. The purpose of this motif is clear: to establish to British audiences what life in England would be, should it be overrun and occupied by an enemy who insist on running the world with "an orderly mind." The whole film is a wartime morale-poster: "Keep a Stiff Upper Lip" and "We Can Take It," etc. (This last slogan, we are clued by one of the movie's Dutch characters, was actually first used by Holland 150 years prior.)The crew represents an interesting cross-section of England: Sir George Corbett (played by Godfrey Tearle, who was the treasonous villain in Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps"), the "old man" of the half-dozen, a WWI vet who wants to have another go at the Hun; Geof Hickman (Bernard Miles), the amiable Cockney; Frank Shelley (Hugh Williams), a tragedian who never passes up the chance to boast of his wife's impending BBC singing performance; Tom Earnshaw (Eric Portman), a Midlands farmer, gloating over pictures of his prize-winning sheep; Bob Ashley (Emrys Jones), the professional soccer-player who is temporarily separated from the other five and accidentally falls in with a Dutch football team after the crew's bailout; and the pilot, John Haggard (Hugh Burden), who bears a coincidental resemblance to a younger version of the film's director, Powell. (Powell himself appears early in the film as an air-traffic controller – or "director" – reciting such lines as "Q for Queenie, you are now clear for takeoff.")The Dutch patriots are a fine, spirited lot: Pamela Brown and Googie Withers (a serious actress, despite the name, and a good one too) play two women who in large part are responsible for the downed fliers' safekeeping. Robert Helpmann, appears as a leering Nazi collaborator. And a very young Peter Ustinov has a small role as a Catholic priest.

"B. for Bertie crashed on Sunday morning. 0431. But our story starts some fifteen hours earlier......."With that simple statement Powell and Pressburger take us on another journey into cinema. A group of wise-cracking RAF crewmen take off on a routine bombing flight. The plane is shot and the crew manage to parachute off the before the plane stalls and crashes.On the ground the men (minus the pilot) gather together. They first encounter a trio of children who ask "have you come to invade Holland?" The men are taken to the adults who debate about what to do with them.Truly inventive film is well thought-out and photographed. Interest never wavers. What could have been a run-of-the-mill war film was skillfully crafted into a film of humanity in the midst of inhumanity.Shameless Laudations!