Director David Macdonald and star Barry K. Barnes worked as a felicitous team in England, much as William K. Howard and Edmund Lowe did in Hollywood. This was the third (and most serious) of five consecutive films that they made together in the late 1930s, including the minor classic This Man Is News shown here in 1981. Exploiting the pre-war spy and sabotage scare, Spies of the Air has some offbeat elements and casting, and was updated to the cold war period as The Net (Project X-7 in the U.S.) for a 1953 remake. William K. Everson