Captains of the Clouds (1942) on Netflix
Approved19421h 54mActionDramaWar
Bush pilot Brian MacLean undercuts his rivals in Northern Ontario and marries Johnny Dutton's girlfriend Emily. Churchill's speech on the radio sends him to enlist in the RCAF.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb6.4/101,997 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Rival bush pilots Johnny Dutton, Tiny Murphy, Blimp Lebec, and British expatriate Scrounger Harris lose business to Brian MacLean in Northern Ontario. Dutton flies by the book and wants an airline of his own, while MacLean flies by instinct. After MacLean falls from a pontoon and strikes his head, Dutton flies a doctor through heavy cloud for emergency surgery, and a grateful MacLean joins him in a partnership to raise money for that airline. MacLean then marries Dutton's girlfriend Emily Foster to keep Dutton from marrying her. Dutton, not knowing why, ends the friendship and joins the Royal Canadian Air Force. Churchill's speech on the radio moves MacLean to enlist with the other bush pilots, but the air force considers them too old for combat.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Captains of the Clouds (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Cagney skipped a stunt double to film his character being struck by a whirling propeller, then overdid his fall into a lake and suffered a real concussion that put the 10-day shoot at North Bay, Ontario behind schedule.
- Before James Cagney was cast, Warner Bros. considered Raymond Massey, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, then settled on George Brent but was unsure whether he could carry the film.
- Captains of the Clouds was James Cagney's first Technicolor film; he took the role reluctantly and only after his brother William was hired as associate producer, quipping that he hadn't liked the story the last four times he did it.
- Captains of the Clouds was the first feature-length Hollywood production to be filmed entirely in Canada, with its Technicolor cinematography by Wilfred M. Cline and Sol Polito.
- North Bay residents pestered the Hollywood crew so persistently that the filmmakers stopped normal communications and sent messages out of the location site by homing pigeons.
- For the climactic ferry mission over the Atlantic, a repainted Hawker Hurricane of the RCAF posed as a German Bf 109, and special alerts had to be posted so "trigger-happy" home defense gunners would not fire on it.
- Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's title song was later adopted as an official song of the Royal Canadian Air Force, though its use became largely ceremonial, and it also appeared in Carl Stalling's Warner Bros. cartoon scores.
- A 30-second scene of the principals running along a dock took an entire day to shoot, leaving James Cagney, Alan Hale and George Tobias barely able to stand.
