Sound Barrier – Three in Search of Adventure

“One day last year, David Lean was reading his evening newspaper. On the front page there was a story about a new jet-propelled aircraft which had disintegrated in the air during a test flight. From the pieces found scattered, it was impossible to discover the cause of the accident. But, the report suggested, it was possible that the plane had cracked up while flying faster than sound; that it had, in fact, been torn asunder when it encountered “the sound barrier” of which little is known. The seed of that news item grew in David Lean’s mind, and a new, imaginative film project ‘The Sound Barrier’ is the result.”

All three forged successful ‘silver screen’ careers.

Sir David Lean is best remembered for Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946) and big-screen epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage To India (1984).

Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan was one of England’s most popular 20th-century dramatists. His plays are generally set in an upper-middle-class background and include works such as The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954) to name a few.

Dorothy Anne Todd became a popular actress from appearing in such films as Perfect Strangers (1945) (as a nurse), The Seventh Veil (1945) (as a troubled concert pianist) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) (as Gregory Peck’s long-suffering wife) She later produced a series of travel films. Ann Todd was known as the “pocket Garbo” for her diminutive, blonde beauty.