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.

The great Ralph Richardson not only walks away with this film but makes Laurence Olivier look as wooden as Richard Todd, John Gregson, Laurence Harvey and Richard Pasco combined. Both primarily actors in the theatre they had appeared in something like ten or twelve movies apiece (including The Divorce Of Lady X in which they both played) but whilst Richardson is laid-back and thoroughly at home before the camera Olivier is self-conscious in the extreme and about as believable as a pilot as Stan Laurel would be as a thoracic surgeon. It's all very Boy's Own Paper with a fair quota of sloppiness in the writing - no explanation of why Richardson is sleeping in a building that is being raided by police and nothing more said of the raid, for example, plus George Merrit's character - supposedly a hard-headed businessman who has built up an airplane factory yet is portrayed as a buffoon. All this is forgiven whenever Richardson is on screen which, luckily for us - and tough for Olivier - is virtually throughout the running time.

Some 20 years before Ian Fleming started writing about these things, it's nice to know that the British Secret Service was on the job and apprehending spies and saboteurs even if they're a bit slow to catch on at times. With a little inside help from the air plant, some Teutonic looking gentleman have perfected a ray that immobilizes airships and brings them down real nice on the ocean. No trace of about four warships has been found at all or their crews. It's of concern to test pilot Laurence Olivier, to British agent Ralph Richardson, and to news reporter Valerie Hobson.Hobson and Richardson are brother and sister. As you can imagine his job involves secrecy and undercover work and Hobson's from the Lois Lane school of journalism. Family dinners must really be something in that family. She also falls for Olivier while she's undercover working as a waitress at a coffee shop near the plane factory.Q Planes must have been seen as wildly fantastic by the 1939 audience, but two generations who saw Sean Connery and Roger Moore engage in even wilder derring-do than is shown in this film, would regard Q Planes as all in a day's work. Olivier and Hobson are fine, but Richardson steals the film whenever he's on screen. Q Planes will never be ranked as in the top 10 of any of these players, but it's a nice breezy espionage comedy/drama made a lot better by some of the greatest thespian talent in the English speaking world of the last century.

A secret British aviation project is being disrupted by a foreign power, until an effete but supremely confident intelligence agent, Charles Hammond, is assigned the case. What follows is a tense espionage thriller that refuses to take itself seriously. Yet strangely, this odd mixture of screwball comedy and political potboiler actually works. "Q Planes" (released in America as "Clouds Over Europe") was directed by an American, Tim Whelan, who establishes a near-anarchic tone throughout. Here, he satirizes what other late-1930's filmmakers may have considered too serious a subject to examine lightly: a potentially disastrous affair for King and country, in which experimental aircraft are being "electronically" hijacked right out of the sky and docked within the confines of a large ship from a hostile nation. (The culprits' nationality is never identified, but as soon as they speak their lines in that thick Teutonic accent, we can just about guess their origin.) The dialogue, much of it written and improvised by the actors themselves, is crackling, smart; and the action, while wildly improbable and clumsily staged, is as unreal and stylized as the characters. The joker in the deck is Hammond himself. As portrayed by Ralph Richardson, he boasts to anyone who will listen of his own considerable skills as a solver of crimes, a solver of crossword puzzles, and a solver of lovers' squabbles. Despite such brash self-assurance, however, Hammond is never tedious. Richardson plays him as an eccentric of many shades and interests – horse-racing addict, amateur master chef, verbal wit extraordinaire, constant belittler of his "gentleman's gentleman" (Gus McNaughton), and a man whose obsession with the intrigue of his case causes him to repeatedly ignore his beloved Daphne (Sandra Storme), the single character who bests Hammond in the film's fittingly ironic conclusion. Hammond is aided on the case by his intrepid sister-reporter, Kay (Valerie Hobson), and a temperamental test-pilot, Tony McVane (Laurence Olivier), whom Kay picks up while snooping around an aircraft factory. Kay's character may have been intended as a caricature of the "liberated" working English suffragette. But she holds her own when competing with her two male cohorts - McVane, who hates reporters and let's rip whenever he hears mention of Kay's profession, and Hammond, the charismatic, ardent egoist-as-detective. "I'm right!" he proclaims to his doubting superiors. "I'm right - and the whole world is wrong!" Naturally, Hammond's irregular method of sleuthing bears out his claim – as if any enemy country could measure up in a contest against single representatives of MI-5, Fleet Street, and the RAF.