The film premiered at the Leicester Square Theatre in London at 6.30pm on Thurs 30 August 1942, as a charity performance in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund.

A newsreel sets the scene for summer 1940, showing Nazi advances in Europe with Britain facing invasion and aerial attacks on the island increasing.

His pilots listen as Crisp begins with the 1922 Schneider Trophy competition, where Mitchell began his most important work, designing high speed aircraft.

Facing opposition from official sources, Mitchell succeeds in creating a series of highly successful seaplane racers, eventually winning the Schneider Trophy outright for Great Britain.

Faced by the devastating news that he has only one year to live and battling against failing health, Mitchell dies just after hearing word that the government has ordered the Spitfire into production.

Mitchell – "the Guv'nor" – was in fact working class and had an explosive temper; apprentices were told to watch the colour of his neck and to run if it turned red.

The film's score was composed by William Walton, who later incorporated major cues into a concert work known as Spitfire Prelude and Fugue.

After seeing the prints, Goldwyn was furious that Niven was cast in a secondary role and personally edited out 40 minutes before reissuing the film as Spitfire.

Jeffrey Quill is the test pilot who flies the Spitfire prototype in the scene demonstrating its ability to climb to 10,000 feet and dive at more than 500 miles per hour.

[9] Geoffrey Crisp is a fictional character that is an amalgam of Vickers's test pilots, Jeffrey Quill (also an RAF veteran) and "Mutt" Summers.

[16] The Sunday Times reported that "the film is full of action, Schneider Trophy races, test flying and flashes from the Battle of Britain with which, pointing its moral, it begins and ends."

"[10] When the film reached US screens in June 1943, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times pronounced it "but a fair motion picture [with] moments of almost tedious restraint."

"It was a truly uncanny coincidence that Spitfire should have opened here just a few days after it was reported that Leslie Howard, its star and producer, had been lost at sea.

It was weird and justly poetic and the loss of Mr Howard was thereby brought more poignantly home because this film, which is a quiet memorial to the designer of the famous British plane, might suitably do the same service, in the eyes of Americans, to its star."

[19]Among modern critics, Leslie Halliwell wrote that the film is a "low-key but impressive biopic with firm acting and good dialogue scenes.