That was an excellent one.

It is a performances centric movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The film, though a good one, seems to have a rushed up ending to draw to the climax as soon as possible. I guess that is called film budgeting.Ralph Richardson, in a way, is comedic here and that was something different for the veteran screen star. As the head of the bureau, he is often right exactly where the action is, while he has to constantly disappoint a female dinner date who can't get to tell him something.The film involves planes with special secretive equipment mysteriously disappearing throughout the world as the war clouds in 1939 are gathering. Laurence Olivier is one of the pilots and he makes sure that when one plane is downed, it doesn't have the necessary material leading the spy ring involved to kill the British employee who was in cahoots with them and thus opening a Pandora's box.Valerie Hobson is a waitress whose shifty eyes and questioning reveals that she is much more than a waitress- a newspaper reporter itching to get information on exactly what is going on. Coincidentally, she is the sister of the Richardson character and soon the love interest of Olivier.Would have rated this even higher had it not been for the rather quick ending to a sordid affair.

It's 1938 and Britain is gearing up for war by testing secret devices in their airplanes. Unfortunately, the airplanes are disappearing over the sea once airborne. Ralph Richardson, an intelligence officer, and Lawrence Olivier, a pilot, come independently to the same conclusion. -- namely that there's a spy in their midst and -- SURPRISE! -- there is a spy in their midst. Not to worry. The spy makes an error and is bumped off by his irate colleagues, just like all the other enemy spies who make mistakes in other movies.There are several familiar names in the cast, including Richardson and Olivier, who at first play rivals. (They were rivals in the real-life theater too.) This isn't their usual milieu. They're not deliberate or thoughtful. They rush through their lines the way they rush through the rooms, flipping off some neat wisecracks along the way.Valerie Hobson has the part of Richardson's nosy journalist sister, which means that Olivier gets the girl. She was something of a surprise. She's tall and slender, and I'm used to seeing her in roles in which she's aristocratic, delicate, and priggish. Here she poses as a counter waitress in order to get stories for her paper and she trades unchaste and speedy quips with the best of them. She's awfully attractive too.The story is nonsense. It has to do with some kind of ray invented by Marconi that disables airplanes in flight at a distance, bring them down into the hands of "those fellows." If the production values weren't as high as they are, if the performances weren't so professional, and if the wit were lower, it could be a Charlie Chan movies, or Mr. Wong, or Fu Manchu. As it is, it's rather fun.

You really can't go wrong with Ralph Richardson in a cast, and it holds true with "Clouds Over Europe," a 1939 film that also stars Laurence Olivier and Valerie Hobson. It's pre-WW II, and Richardson plays a secret service man in England who is convinced that a series of missing planes from diverse places is no accident. He's convinced the planes are being sabotaged, but by whom, and why? Olivier plays one of the pilots, and he's funny as well as handsome. Valerie Hobson is a reporter in an adversarial relationship with Olivier. She turns out to be related to someone else in the film.But it's Richardson who steals the show with his eccentric portrayal of Major Charles Hammond, a man who always forgets his umbrella and returns for it. He helps to give this affair a lightheartedness that makes it enjoyable.Recommended for its very good British cast.

No wonder that this picture anticipates Bond by 25 years, it was co written by Jack Whittingham, who was one of the principle architects of the movie version of James Bond. Whittingham shares a credit on the film, and the novel, Thunderball, which was originally intended to be the first James Bond picture. More than a few of the classic Bond tropes are contained in the story--it actually points to Dr No (bringing down planes electronically) and to so many of the Bond stories that have huge battles at the end, with the hero freeing, and/or working alongside troops of one kind or another.