Well made movie with compelling human drama and larger than life themes.

Presumably takes place after WWII but before Chuck Yeager's officially breaking the barrier in late '47. Very good by all means, although not one of Terence Rattigan's best scripts or Lean's biggest directorial works. Tense and morally interesting. The character of Susan, who objects to test piloting, makes an evidently wrong but compelling humanitarian case against her progress-minded father - whose counter-arguments are not as sound as they could be, especially from a modern perspective.

Usually I don't get too annoyed about historical and technical inaccuracies, but I've got to say I was genuinely disappointed to find out how much of this (seemingly all of it...) was fiction and also about the major error concerning how the planes are flown. It just seems so incongruous with the amount of attention the film puts towards explaining the technical details of it all. Still the film is charming, compelling, thematically engaging and at a couple points genuinely rather thrilling.

Film ignores the fact that American test pilot Chuck Yeager had already accomplished the goal, with Lean filming in a semi-documentary style complete with aerial footage of actual jets.

This is all about progress, and how it's all worth it no matter how high the human cost. More basically, it's all about how a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do... a theme that blends very nicely with the whole British stiff-upper-lip thing... and it's all made in the same sort of crisp, economical, highly graceful, utterly English way that Clive Barker's horror stories are written

Great classic.