"Forty-seven thousand now," says the pilot. The final test is in progress and the radio transmissions are being piped into Richardson's office. But at least Richardson's humanity and horror and anguish are revealed when his daughter visits him more or less by accident.
#BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER MOVIE#
Ya'd never see somethin' like that in an American movie like "The Right Stuff." Sobbin' is fer wimmin. An hour later, alone in a room, he begins giggling hysterically and turns to sobbing. The solution to the problem is too simple to be taken seriously but at any rate the pilot survives.
#BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER CRACK#
Patrick's friend and fellow pilot takes over the final mission to crack the sound barrier. Owing nothing to Hitchcock's "Psycho" they kill off the protagonist and leave us gaping, the way Patrick leaves an untidy hole gaping in what appears to be an astonishingly tidy farm field, a bit of smoking wreckage scattered about. The director and writer - David Lean and Terrence Rattigan - pull a fast one on us two thirds of the way through. The Brits are like American Southerners, adept at reading others' emotional states from the smallest indications, and women are better at it than men. And at least one viewer (ie., me) had to think over earlier scenes to pick up on the hints. "He's always resented me for not being a son." Patrick hasn't noticed. "You must have noticed the distance between father and me," she confesses. She wants them and their baby to have their own place and leave Richardson's house.
She marries a test pilot, Nigel Patrick, "not of your level," who is given a job flying new jets for Richardson's company. End of son, played by a surprisingly undebauched looking Denholm Elliot. His effete but game son feels compelled to become a flier because that's what the rigid Richardson seems to expect of him. Ralph Richardson plays the head of an aircraft manufacturing empire.
This movie stands up at least as well as the more expensive epic based on Tom Wolf's book, although "Breaking the Sound Barrier" is in black and white, virtually without special effects, and characterized not by arguments and competition, but by stiff upper-lipness and British taciturnity. You can't help comparing this to "The Right Stuff," particularly the sections that deal with Chuck Yeager's exploits.
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