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Coastal Command
Directed by	J. B. Holmes
Music by	Ralph Vaughan Williams
Release date(s)	1942
Running time	73 minutes
Country	UK
Language	English
IMDb

Coastal Command is a 1942 British film made by the Crown Film Unit for the Ministry of Information. The movie, distributed by RKO, dramatised the work of RAF Coastal Command. It was made under the supervision of Ian Dalrymple, with the full cooperation of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. The participants of the movie were active RAF officers, NCOs and aircrew, and RN officers, and included pilot Roger Hunter and Flight Sergeant Charles Norman Lewis; both were killed in World War II[1]. The performances were generally well-received.^{[citation needed]} Coastal Command is notable for its score by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Plot

Coastal Command is a documentary-style account of the Shorts Sunderland and PBY Catalina flying boats during the Second Battle of the Atlantic. The film includes real footage of attacks on a major enemy ship by Hudson and Halifax bombers based in Iceland. Later, the film depicts a routine sea patrol, in which a Sunderland flying boat flies over a convoy and bombs a German U-boat. Two versions of the film were made, one featuring an explanatory voice-over. In this version, the film ends with a combined air attack on an enemy cruiser caught away from its base. The Sunderland's crew returns to England, mission accomplished, and with a wounded crew member in stable condition. In the second, slightly longer version of the film, the Sunderland crew returns home after the successful attack on the cruiser, and the wounded crew member is hospitalized. After a visit to the hospital, the film ends as the Sunderland crew is informed they will be re-deployed to West Africa, to begin a new mission.

Cast and credits

• Director - J. B. Holmes.
• Cameraman - Jonah Jones.

Score

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Vaughan Williams' score is colorful and atmospheric, and might be more popular if he had tailored it to a concert version, as Prokofiev had done with two of his film scores. Muir Mathieson did fashion a seven-movement suite from Coastal Command, but it has been largely ignored despite its overall high quality. Rumnon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic recorded a suite from the film in 2002. The recording has been released by Chandos (ASIN: B00006JK96). The score is typical of Vaughan Williams' later vigorous, Neo-romantic style. The music associated with the Hebrides (islands off the western coast of Scotland) is atmospheric in its dark and subdued sonorities and perhaps hints here of the Antarctic music associated with the score for Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and its offshoot the Sinfonia Antartica. The music accompanying the encounter with, and sinking of, the German U-boat is both exciting and colorful, not the glorious-sounding stuff of shallow expression so often heard in other war films.

Vaughan Williams composed some of his most vigorous and energetic music for the scene where bombers depart Iceland to drop their deadly cargo on the German ship Düsseldorf in the North Sea. For the scene where the Sunderland is en route to view the damaged Düsseldorf, he supplies music that is serene and proud, using a glorious theme that would not be out of place in a grandiose choral work. The music used for the battle of the Beauforts is exciting and rhythmic, and most of the rest of the score is also of high quality. While Coastal Command cannot be compared with the better efforts of Prokofiev (Lieutenant Kije, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible), it is nevertheless an important score that ought to receive greater attention.

Reviews

After its release in the United States on 18 April 1944, a New York Times reviewer wrote that it suffered in comparison with the similar Memphis Belle documentary.[2]. However, he did write that

Many of the individual glimpses in this film are intriguing to the eye, and the whole conveys an academic notion of the personal and organizational problems of the Coastal Command. But the obvious studio-staging of much of the action in which personnel is involved and the scattered arrangement of continuity drain the film of sharp immediacy and drive. Because it jumps its scenes from one plane to another, from shore to plane—and even a few times to the Nazi ship—without adequate definition, the spectator is forced to an objective point of view. A sense of artificial construction is plainly inevitable. Thus suspense and excitement are lacking. The mood becomes fitful and blasé.

References

• Neil Owen, Royal Air Force Station Oban 1939-45: A History of Flying Boat Operations
• Roger Manvell, "Films and the Second World War" (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1974)

External links

• Score
• Coastal Command at the Internet Movie Database

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