Totally made up fantasy about how the sound barrier was initially broken by some English guy. It mashes up the true death of test pilot Geoffrey de Havilland in 1946 with a made-up subsequent crash and a made-up subsequent pioneering blast through the sound barrier, and it was written and filmed more than enough years after Chuck Yeager had really broken the sound barrier (after de Havilland's crash) to be a pretty outrageously and fictitiously an expression of British nationalism.
All of the characters are very posh and very English (and of course lily white), with the exception of an irascible Scottish technical genius who may well have been the prototype for "Scotty" in the Star Trek franchise. Just the sort of movie you'd expect from postwar Britain when they thought they'd still be ruling the world for ever and ever, even as the empire was already disintegrating. Pretty good acting, but the characters are all a little too refined, too restrained, and too polite, even as the rather unscrupulous head of the aircraft company in the movie gets a pass on getting test pilots killed in the interest of being the first guy to build a supersonic plane.
All of the characters are very posh and very English (and of course lily white), with the exception of an irascible Scottish technical genius who may well have been the prototype for "Scotty" in the Star Trek franchise. Just the sort of movie you'd expect from postwar Britain when they thought they'd still be ruling the world for ever and ever, even as the empire was already disintegrating. Pretty good acting, but the characters are all a little too refined, too restrained, and too polite, even as the rather unscrupulous head of the aircraft company in the movie gets a pass on getting test pilots killed in the interest of being the first guy to build a supersonic plane.