Project M7

Director Anthony Asquith, better known for adapting plays to the screen, is surprisingly involved in what I see labeled as a B pic, THE NET, which seems to borrow a few ideas and shooting angles from David Lean's THE SOUND BARRIER (UK 1952).

The Cold War in its infancy, THE NET already has Noel Willman as a sly and ruthless villain, the ever reliable James Donald as the scientist putting his life (and marriage) at risk, and the lovely Phyllis Calvert as Donald's loving wife who has the briefest of affairs with Herbet Lom, who plays Dr Axel Leon, the man supposed to control the M7 aircraft from the military base, and so ensure that Donald stays alive.

Curiosity: Herbert Lom, who would rise to fame as the bungling and vindictive police inspector in several PINK PANTHER films in the late 1960s and during the 1970s, has in the cast the closest to a name sake: Herbert Lomas playing the part of George Jackson.

Pretty Pavlow and Lomas are supposed to be in love but, unlike Calvert and Lom, they never kiss on screen, and you end up wondering whether the film or the plot needed them at all.

Photography is so-so (some of the model shots are quite rudimentary), the acting not exactly memorable (villain Willman steals the show), and the script by William Fairchild certainly has holes. One detail I could not work out: why is this film called THE NET? Spy net? The net provided by ground control? That "net of a fossilized scientist" keeping him from his wife (who just turns up in the high secretive and sensitive control room and even takes over communication with the aircraft, as if that could ever happen) just does not convince me one bit.

In the end, it is a somewhat interesting foray into post WWII aviation, and how the trials and errors of the time paved the way for the much safer flying we have today.