Lancaster crews who proved heroes aren’t all mavericks

Lancaster (PG, 110 mins) Verdict: Compelling and moving ★★★★★

Top Gun: Maverick (12A, 131 mins) Verdict: Cheesily enjoyable ★★★★✩

ATERRIFIC 2018 documentary called Spitfire told, wonderfully, the enduringly uplifting tale of the iconic aircraft that helped Fighter Command to win the Battle of Britain.

Now, from the same team, comes Lancaster, switching the focus to Bomber Command and the RAF’s mission to ‘take the war’ to Nazi Germany. It is an even better film, because it tells with admirable sensitivity a more morally complicated story, and of course at the heart of it is the mighty Lancaster bomber and the courageous men who crewed it.

More than 55,000 of them died at the time and not many of them are still alive now, but 37 of those who are — or were when the project got under way — share their compelling recollections. They include bomb-aimer ‘Johnny’ Johnson, now 100 and the only surviving original member of the famous 617 ‘Dambusters’ Squadron.

He is scathing about those who, applying what he considers to be modern sensitivities to wartime imperatives, criticise the ruthlessness of Bomber Command under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, who ordered the thunderous 1945 attack on Dresden.

Other veterans in this tremendously poignant film, sonorously narrated by Charles Dance but heavily reliant on talking heads, are more ambivalent about what they were ordered to do. Yet they still lament the way Winston Churchill distanced himself from Bomber Command’s activities as soon as the war was over, allowing Harris to take the ‘blame’.

ONE, flight engineer Jack Watson, recalls his wife turning to him at an RAF reunion, astonished, because he had never even told her he’d served with Bomber Command. He had become too accustomed, he explained, to being looked at as if he was a murderer. At the time they had been married 35 years.

To their huge credit, co-directors David Fairhead and Ant Palmer manage to navigate their way through all this with real finesse, laying the moral complexities out before us (and interviewing a German woman who remembers what the inferno looked like from the ground) yet leaving us in no doubt that these very old men, all of them in their mid-90s at least, were heroes before most of them had left their teens, risking their lives night after night. At the start, they recall, it was left to them to divide into seven-man crews. They milled around checking each other’s ‘brevets’ (uniform insignia) to see who did what, and then picked a team like kids in the school playground. Charles Clarke, a bomb-aimer, finds another analogy. ‘It was like a dating agency,’ he says.

This brilliant documentary is full of nuggets like that. But it is also beautifully orchestrated, with stirring aerial footage (by John Dibbs) of one of the only two Lancasters still airworthy, and a terrific original score (by Chris Roe).

The film ends with a male-voice choir singing a wartime aircrew song, We Are The Heavy Bombers, which might not sound like a contender to bring tears to the eyes. But it did to mine.

■ THE anonymity of the 37 heroes interviewed in Lancaster rather underlines the absurdity of the spectacular hoopla surrounding Tom Cruise when he arrived at the Cannes Film Festival last week to promote Top Gun: Maverick. There was even a fly-past of fighter jets. Still, within the realms of make-believe heroism, it’s a very enjoyable film. After seeing it in Cannes I’d say it’s nothing if not formulaic, and at times the script is cheesier than a croque monsieur. But the action scenes are splendid, and Cruise, at almost 60 but as willing as ever to whip his shirt off, looks predictably great.

Merely by showing his gleaming teeth he makes a mockery of one especially clunky line, when an upstart in a bar calls him ‘Pops’.

A long-awaited sequel to the 1986 hit, this one, directed by Joseph Kosinski, has Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Cruise) confounding his stiff commanding officer (Jon Hamm) by proving that he’s still the greatest pilot up there. Yep, he’s still the guy to lead a ridiculously perilous bombing raid — ‘egress is a steep highG climb!’ — on a uranium enrichment plant in an unnamed rogue state, even though he a) is just an instructor these days and b) has been grounded.

The plot gives us some friction with ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), who blames him for the death of his father ‘Goose’, Maverick’s erstwhile colleague and best pal, all those years ago. And there is friction of a different kind with Jennifer Connelly’s Penny, the obligatory love interest (Cruise’s squeeze in Top Gun, Kelly McGillis, presumably being ruled too old for him now).

But really this film is about the flying. And in that respect, if in no other, it soars.

■ Lancaster is in selected cinemas from today, and on digital, DVD & Blu-ray from sunday. Visit altitude.film for more info. top Gun is in cinemas now.