Biggles
Short description
Jim Ferguson is a New York advertising man whose life takes an unexpected turn when he is thrown back through time to 1917, landing on a First World War battlefield in France. There he saves the life of James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, a Royal Flying Corps pilot whose reconnaissance aircraft has just been shot down. Just as suddenly, Jim is returned to his own decade, only to be pulled back to the war whenever Biggles is in danger. A mysterious figure, Colonel William Raymond, draws Jim into investigating these journeys, and the two men find themselves caught up in a threat that reaches across both eras.
Biggles was directed by John Hough, released in 1986 as the tenth of the eleven features listed in his filmography, following Incubus and preceding American Gothic. Kent Walwin and John Groves wrote the screenplay, and the cast includes Neil Dickson as the pilot, Alex Hyde-White as Jim, Fiona Hutchison as Debbie, Peter Cushing as Raymond and Marcus Gilbert as Von Stalhein, with twenty-three credited performers in all.
On TMDB the film holds a rating of 5.2 out of 10 from 81 votes, suggesting a modest response from those who have seen it. Blending action, fantasy, science fiction and war elements with a family-oriented adventure, it mixes a contemporary setting with the aerial conflict of the First World War.
What's left behind the scenes
- Scenes like the one where a helicopter lands on the roof of a train traveling at 64 km/h and takes off again had never been filmed before; during the production of this movie, this scene was repeated 15 times before the director was completely satisfied.
- The scene at the testing ground was filmed at a closed factory in London. A year later, Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) filmed several scenes of his war drama 'Full Metal Jacket' (1987) at the same location.
- According to the original script, this was intended to be an adventure film in the vein of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (Steven Spielberg, 1981) and something closer in spirit to the novels of W.E. Johns (1893–1968). However, while the script was being written, Robert Zemeckis's sci-fi film 'Back to the Future' (1985) was released and became a hit, so the script was changed to align with this trend in hopes of repeating Zemeckis's success.
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