Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) is a British comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Director Ken Annakin gathered a sprawling international cast — Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, James Fox, Terry-Thomas, Benny Hill, Robert Morley, Alberto Sordi and Gert Fröbe — for a 20th Century Fox production that turned the early days of aviation into a carnival of national stereotypes.

The year is 1910. Newspaper tycoon Lord Rawnsley offers £10,000 to whoever crosses the English Channel first. The starting line fills with a Texan adventurer, a lovesick Frenchman, a rigidly efficient German officer, a scheming English aristocrat and a flotilla of pilots whose planes look as likely to collapse as to fly. Every crash, every mid-air blunder and every underhanded act of sabotage is played for maximum comedy.

What makes the film hold up is the practical scale of it: real Edwardian-era aircraft replicas, actual aerial stunts and a cast too large to be boring. It runs nearly two and a half hours, but that runtime is filled with gags rather than padding — a rare balance for ensemble comedy. Stream Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) online on iFILM.