GB
1939
1hr 18mins
Dir: David MacDonald
Starring: Roger Livesey and Joan Marion
A test pilot suspects a spy is trying to steal the secrets of an experimental new aircraft
This espionage adventure was based on the play Official Secret by Jeffrey Dell. It features a scene near the beginning that was filmed at London Liverpool Street station, with LNER coaches in the platform and an unidentified locomotive can be seen at the bufferstops. Shortly after this there is a sequence that is filmed on a boat that is docked at what is said to be Harwich, and some railway wagons are briefly visible in the background. The film was released in the UK in March 1939, but it would be another fifteen months before it was released in the US, and then it was abridged to 62 minutes. The film was originally going to be re-titled as The Fifth Column for the US market, but Ernest Hemingway sued the production company as he felt that the new title infringed on his The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories anthology released the previous year. Hemingway won the suit, and the film reverted to its original title of Spies of the Air, although it also appeared as Spies in the Air.
