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Thorold Dickinson was replaced by Brian Desmond Hurst as director.

Nigel Balchin, a hugely popular wartime novelist, was brought in to reconfigure the script. They formed a company with producer Peter de Sarigny, called Theta Films, to make the movie, which they intended to call The Bright Flame.īut there were financial problems, and when J Arthur Rank agreed to fund production, he asked for substantial changes. Thorold Dickinson, one of the leading British directors of the day (Gaslight, 1940, and The Next of Kin, 1942) prepared to direct. William Fairchild wrote a script based around an affair between a British photo-reconnaissance pilot and a Maltese woman. While it tells something of the suffering facing the Maltese people, it is primarily a film about Britain at war – with the island as a backdrop.

This highlights the film’s greatest strength and also its greatest weakness. The siege of Malta was suggested as a good way to illustrate this. Its strategic position, as a staging post between Gibraltar and Egypt, its importance as both a Royal Navy and RAF base, and the ability of aircraft flying from the island to strike at Sicily, mainland Italy, and much of the North African theatre of war gave the tiny outcrop in the blue waters of the Mediterranean a central and heroic role in the war from 1940 to summer 1943.įive years after the Allied victory, the Central Office of Information decided to encourage the making of a film to promote the combined operation of the three armed services. However, the island survived this long siege by Italian and German forces and played an important role in turning the tide of war in the Mediterranean. Nearly 1,500 Maltese civilians were killed in the raids and 24,000 properties were damaged or destroyed, including a high proportion of the islanders’ homes. Between then and November 1942, there were 3,215 raids and 14,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Malta and Gozo, averaging just under 100 tonnes per square mile, although much of the bombing was concentrated on the dockyards of Valletta and on the island’s three major airfields. The first air raid on the island took place seven hours after Italy entered the war in June 1940. In the spring of 1942, Malta had the dubious distinction of being the most-bombed place on earth.