In this movie, at least as much as in any other, John Wayne exudes John Wayneness. A man of genuine bulk, he seemed to move by first swinging his extremities in the desired direction while his massive torso followed out of sheer momentum. Then there was the deep smoke-cured baritone punctuated with lengthy pauses. "I'd like ya ta . . . go back there and . . . kinda comfort the . . . passengers." No one has explained why a man more than six feet tall was given to wearing high-heeled cowboy boots and lifts in his shoes in his daily life.
This is the prototype of the airplane movie. A simple flight from Honolulu to San Francisco goes all wrong. After the requisite period during which we get to know the passengers and the crew and all their dreams and nightmares, one of the four engines loses its prop and decides to slump in its mounting. The airplane is spewing aviation gasoline from its punctured wing while the crew runs around and the passengers scream and light up cigarettes to calm their nerves. Later, engine number four begins to act up too and must be feathered. Do they have enough altitude and enough fuel to land in San Francisco or must they ditch? By the way, the real events on which this story were based can be found in the Byronic Ernest K. Gann's memoirs, "Fate Is The Hunter." They're not so dramatic but far more harrowing. Makes you wonder if God had wanted man to fly, wouldn't He have given him -- well, at least airplanes that don't fall apart in midair?
I'm happy to report that this airplane in peril has one of those lovable kids aboard, a freckle-faced youngster (actually, I think, the director's grandson) who sleeps through the whole ordeal. He's treated tenderly. Let me see. At one point or another, people ruffle his hair, put a blanket over him, ease him into his life vest without waking him, and gently blow up his life vest by mouth instead of popping it up with a loud discharge from the CO2 containers. Oh, yes, the stewardess leans over and kisses his forehead. This kid of course has spawned dozens of other airplane kids, usually sick ones. But he does serve a purpose. Wisely, as the airplane sets down on SFO's runway with only a cup full of fuel left in its tanks, the camera stays on the boy as the airplane touches down, lurching and squealing a bit. The alternative -- watching the adult faces grow ecstatic -- would be too bitter to contemplate.
Among the passengers is a paranoid who causes a lot of trouble and is named Humphrey Agnew -- pretty good, eh? There is a startling moment when Jan Sterling as a somewhat beaten whore decides to face life without pretense and removes her makeup, or half of it anyway.
When the film was released, everybody was whistling Dmitri Tiomkin's theme. It was on pop charts, despite Ned Washington's dreadful lyrics ("See the High and Mighty, way up in the sky, with a watchful eye"). And, facing facts, the score can't be easily ignored. Tiomkin hits you over the head with every instrument in his armory -- his signature chimes, cow bells, glockenspiels, and flatulent trombones. He Mickey Mouses some of the actions. When the Coast Guard is on screen he goes to "Semper Paratus." A comic flashback is supported by the overture from "The Barber of Seville." If someone prays, there is a female choir. As the passengers debark, there is a baroque-tinted jubilo. The man will stop at nothing. Tiomkin was sui generis in that he was the only film composer who never wanted to do anything else, never wanted to compose The Great American Symphony. In his later Westerns, he imagined the cowboys to be trotting around the steppes of his native Russia. But all this was pretty typical of 1950s Hollywood and not offensive.
I mentioned makeup before and, having seen this for the first time in so many years, that's what first grips a contemporary viewer -- the makeup. The women are positively garish, with faces like masks and false lashes long enough to flap in a stiff breeze. Their hair color tends to be bleach or a feisty raw red. I'd like to call it "henna" but I don't know what color that is. Or even if it IS a color. And not just the women but the men too are overly made up. Every one of them seems to be so artificially tanned that they look ready for the casket.
As a kind of footnote, I was stationed at the Coast Guard Air Station at San Francisco International Airport a few months after the movie was released and they weren't using converted B-17s as escort planes. They used a version of the B-24 called a "Privateer". When an alarm came in, and they regularly did, the crew managed to get its airplane started and into the air in about 5 minutes, an admirable feat.
A Hollywood product, full of clichés and bombast and ham. It lost the Oscar to "On the Waterfront", deservedly. But it was fresh at the time of its release and, overall, it's nicely done. The film asks us to sit through an hour of character sketches, and it's a disaster movie without a disaster. Nobody would take that kind of chance with a film today. The audience wouldn't have the patience.
This is the prototype of the airplane movie. A simple flight from Honolulu to San Francisco goes all wrong. After the requisite period during which we get to know the passengers and the crew and all their dreams and nightmares, one of the four engines loses its prop and decides to slump in its mounting. The airplane is spewing aviation gasoline from its punctured wing while the crew runs around and the passengers scream and light up cigarettes to calm their nerves. Later, engine number four begins to act up too and must be feathered. Do they have enough altitude and enough fuel to land in San Francisco or must they ditch? By the way, the real events on which this story were based can be found in the Byronic Ernest K. Gann's memoirs, "Fate Is The Hunter." They're not so dramatic but far more harrowing. Makes you wonder if God had wanted man to fly, wouldn't He have given him -- well, at least airplanes that don't fall apart in midair?
I'm happy to report that this airplane in peril has one of those lovable kids aboard, a freckle-faced youngster (actually, I think, the director's grandson) who sleeps through the whole ordeal. He's treated tenderly. Let me see. At one point or another, people ruffle his hair, put a blanket over him, ease him into his life vest without waking him, and gently blow up his life vest by mouth instead of popping it up with a loud discharge from the CO2 containers. Oh, yes, the stewardess leans over and kisses his forehead. This kid of course has spawned dozens of other airplane kids, usually sick ones. But he does serve a purpose. Wisely, as the airplane sets down on SFO's runway with only a cup full of fuel left in its tanks, the camera stays on the boy as the airplane touches down, lurching and squealing a bit. The alternative -- watching the adult faces grow ecstatic -- would be too bitter to contemplate.
Among the passengers is a paranoid who causes a lot of trouble and is named Humphrey Agnew -- pretty good, eh? There is a startling moment when Jan Sterling as a somewhat beaten whore decides to face life without pretense and removes her makeup, or half of it anyway.
When the film was released, everybody was whistling Dmitri Tiomkin's theme. It was on pop charts, despite Ned Washington's dreadful lyrics ("See the High and Mighty, way up in the sky, with a watchful eye"). And, facing facts, the score can't be easily ignored. Tiomkin hits you over the head with every instrument in his armory -- his signature chimes, cow bells, glockenspiels, and flatulent trombones. He Mickey Mouses some of the actions. When the Coast Guard is on screen he goes to "Semper Paratus." A comic flashback is supported by the overture from "The Barber of Seville." If someone prays, there is a female choir. As the passengers debark, there is a baroque-tinted jubilo. The man will stop at nothing. Tiomkin was sui generis in that he was the only film composer who never wanted to do anything else, never wanted to compose The Great American Symphony. In his later Westerns, he imagined the cowboys to be trotting around the steppes of his native Russia. But all this was pretty typical of 1950s Hollywood and not offensive.
I mentioned makeup before and, having seen this for the first time in so many years, that's what first grips a contemporary viewer -- the makeup. The women are positively garish, with faces like masks and false lashes long enough to flap in a stiff breeze. Their hair color tends to be bleach or a feisty raw red. I'd like to call it "henna" but I don't know what color that is. Or even if it IS a color. And not just the women but the men too are overly made up. Every one of them seems to be so artificially tanned that they look ready for the casket.
As a kind of footnote, I was stationed at the Coast Guard Air Station at San Francisco International Airport a few months after the movie was released and they weren't using converted B-17s as escort planes. They used a version of the B-24 called a "Privateer". When an alarm came in, and they regularly did, the crew managed to get its airplane started and into the air in about 5 minutes, an admirable feat.
A Hollywood product, full of clichés and bombast and ham. It lost the Oscar to "On the Waterfront", deservedly. But it was fresh at the time of its release and, overall, it's nicely done. The film asks us to sit through an hour of character sketches, and it's a disaster movie without a disaster. Nobody would take that kind of chance with a film today. The audience wouldn't have the patience.