Bombs Away

By F.R.

HANOVER STREET Directed and Written by Peter Hyams

The year was 1943, and all of Europe was in love. Well, not all of Europe. What with a war going on and Nazis everywhere, some people only had time for death. But David Halloran, a derring-do American pilot, and Margaret Sellinger, a proper British wife, were special. David and Margaret had time for everything: for love, for death, for sex and, most of all, for tea. Hanover Street is the tear-dripping saga of this couple's tea-sipping romance in war-torn Europe. It is the kind of big-screen romance they just don't make any more. Why Columbia Pictures bothered to produce Hanover Street is the biggest mystery to cloud that company since the departure of David Begelman.

Hanover Street stars two highly attractive actors, Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down, as well as the genteel Christopher Plummer in the role of the heroine's betrayed husband. The movie has three types of scenes: briefing scenes, bombing scenes and tearoom scenes. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish among them because every set in the film, indoors and out, is flooded with mist. The sound track is inundated with John Barry's crashing score, next to which Michel Legrand's florid music for Summer of '42 sounds like Hindemith. Yet the plot does somehow manage to emerge. About halfway into Hanover Street, both of the heroine's men end up on the same-secret intelligence mission behind enemy lines in France. Things get tense. Who will live and who will die? Who will run across a crowded hospital ward to embrace fair Margaret by the final credits? Will the Nazis cut off Fortnum & Mason's supply of Twinings English Breakfast Tea? And, if so, will Ovaltine suffice? Hanover Street's answers to these questions tend to be tough, but no one ever said that war was a picnic .

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