War Movie Theatre | for Fans of Classic War Films and Cinema History · Robert Hutton & Duncan Weldon - War Movies Fans

Reach For The Sky - with Peter Apps

·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

The first half is one of the great bits of cinema about resilience, and the second half depends on it.

Rob Hutton and Duncan Weldon frame the episode with the kind of joke that makes clear where the show lives: a place where war films, old movie lore, and low-level stunt podcasting all get to share a table. Peter Apps joins as the guest, and the first thing he does is explain that Reach For The Sky has been in his life for a long time because he found a copy of the book as a child in his grandparents' house. He says he was about seven or eight when he came across it, and by then he had already got into Biggles books. The 1980s Biggles film gets a brief, baffled mention, because some childhood experiences just stick. From there the episode moves into the film itself, but it does so in the show's usual roundabout way, starting with memory and then backing into the picture. Peter and the hosts talk about what the film is doing emotionally, and the discussion keeps circling back to how good the flying material is. The Battle of Britain sequences get real admiration. The cinematography is singled out. The sunrise shots are praised. The visual storytelling is treated as a strength, not an accident. The hosts clearly enjoy the scale of the air combat. There is a plain affection for anything with more than three flying Spitfires in it. When the film reaches the scene where the pilot is shot down and bailing out with his leg jammed, the conversation opens up around the drama of it. That passage gets treated as proper big-screen material, the kind of thing that feels almost Bond-like in its staging. The episode then turns to structure and duration. Reach For The Sky is noted as being long for a 1950s film, running around two hours ten or two hours fifteen depending on the version. The hosts compare that with the much shorter norm for 1940s and 1950s cinema, and they argue that the length mostly comes from the extended material after the accident. One clean cut, they suggest, would be to end it at the shoot-down and jump forward to after the wall sequence. They also wonder whether the American cut trimmed about ten minutes, probably from the first half. Even so, the film is not treated as a slog. The point is not that it is too long in a damaging way. The point is that the first half is especially distinctive, while the later prisoner-of-war material moves into territory that feels more familiar from other Battle of Britain or captivity films. That familiarity is not dismissed. It just means the film's particular force lies in the way it begins. Peter keeps pushing the conversation toward what makes the picture useful, not just what makes it enjoyable. He talks about how the film connects to a wider tradition of war cinema, and the hosts use that to compare it with other prison camp and aerial-combat stories. The argument stays generous throughout. Nobody is trying to pretend the film is a masterpiece on every front. They are more interested in what it does well and why those scenes still work. The show also lets Peter widen the frame beyond film. He talks about how the story of the film and the period around it connects to his own thinking about war, memory, and the democratic world. There is an overlay, as he puts it, between what the film shows and what older generations would have recognized from the last war. That gives the episode a quieter historical weight without making it solemn. By the end, Peter points listeners toward his own book if they want to think about the present moment as well as the film's past. The hosts thank him, and the episode closes in the show's usual way, with the sense that the conversation has wandered through film history, personal memory, and military afterlife without ever losing the plot. It is a long, talky, slightly sideways discussion, and that is exactly why it works.

As heard by us

A generous, history-aware discussion that makes a long war film feel newly worth revisiting.

The episode treats Reach for the Sky as more than a tidy old war picture. It is also personal for Peter Apps, who first found the book as a child in his grandparents' house and came to it through Biggles.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want war-film talk with memory, craft, and a proper sense of context.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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