User Reviews

It's a routine story of three men in the Air Force Air Rescue Service in the post-war years. It reminded me of "Pearl Harbor" a bit. You may remember that epic CGI action sequences at the beginning and a super duper action scene at the end, with an extended black hole in the middle that dealt with a covert romantic triangle.

Okay. Take that endless middle section, full of torment and opposite allegiances, like Buridan's ass that starved to death between two bales of hay because he couldn't make up his mind. Now chop that long middle part into three or four shorter parts and interpolate them at regular periods throughout the film. These are the back stories of the three men aboard a Grumman flying boat on a rescue mission in the North China Sea. And -- boy, are they dull.

George Chakiris, the young pilot, is haunted by the memory of his rescue chopper causing an avalanche in the Alps and killing those he'd intended to rescue. Well, that's not a love story but you get the general picture. Chakiris is haunted by guilt and is uncertain about his flying skills. The second story belongs to Richard Widmark, the colonel in charge. He was a commercial pilot in World War II, captured along with his wife by the Japanese in the Filippines. She was denied medicine by her captors and she and her baby died in child birth. Widmark still hates Japs. "These things run deep," he mutters.

Then we get Yul Brynner's tragedy. A paratrooper in North Africa, he falls for a lovely Arab girl but her family forbids the affair to continue. Brynner races to her house, shouts up at her window that he'll be back some day and they will be married. Then he must zoom off in a Jeep and join the others on the demolition team. But his girl defies her family and runs after the jeep. She finally catches up with them just after Brynner has lighted the fuses that will blow a brick bridge to smithereens. By happenstance -- or Kismet in her case -- she comes to a halt just under the bridge, flings her arms open wide, and shouts, "MICHEL", to Brynner. Boom. She disappears in a puff of smoke like a stage magician.

If you think all this misery is too much, you still have to suffer through the chief action of the film, of which we get glimpses from time to time. Widmark, Brynner, and Chakiris are still flying that Grumman through a powerful storm to rescue a raft filled with Japanese.

Will Widmark hesitate to try a landing in an impossibly heavy and confused sea? Will Brynner talk him into it? Will Widmark finally yield? Does he successfully land the plane? Does he break his arm in doing so? Must Chakiris then take over the controls and get the overloaded flying boat skillfully off the sea and into the air? Are all the crises resolved at the end? You'll have to watch it to find out.

I wish it were possible to say that the action scenes -- the flying through the storm, the scenes on the raft in the tossing swells, the Japanese bombing of the Filippines, the plowing of the Grumman through the whipped-up sea, were exciting but they're really not. The airplanes are clearly models and not done very well. The raft scenes were shot in the studio tank. The special effects are hardly an improvement on director Michael Anderson's much superior "The Dam Busters", made in 1955.

I hate to sound sour about this but the performances seem lazy or inept as well. Of course it's difficult for any actor to overcome a stilted script. But to see a mature Yul Brynner stumbling around with a cane, trying to speak English to a young woman who speaks only Arabic and French, and to hear him using slang words like "crazy," as if he were fifteen years old, is almost grotesque. And here he is with the other members of the combat engineers fighting a delaying action and he and the rest wear the spiffiest, cleanest, most finely pressed uniforms known to man or beast. Their helmets are as glossy as their boots. Chakiris, a good dancer, was never much of an actor, and this is one of Widmark's most lackadaisical performances.

See it if you must but it's not very good.

.....and a good example of depicting the Air Force at its best is FLIGHT FROM ASHIYA (1964), a co-production of Harold Hecht Films and Daiei Motion Picture Company, which makes it an American-Japanese movie....and a darned good one. Richard Widmark heads the cast as Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Stevenson, George Chakiris plays Second Lieutenant John Gregg, and Yul Brynner is in it as aircraft crew chief Master Sergeant Mike Takashima. They take off from Ashiya Air Base on a rescue mission; they have to recover survivors of a sunken cargo/passenger ship that exploded and later sank in the South China Sea, and it's in the middle of a typhoon! Each of the trio has a flashback: Lieutenant Gregg and then-Major Stevenson return to a mountainside church in a Sikorsky helicopter to pick up more victims just in time for an avalanche to bury those victims, which leaves him scared to fly solo; Glenn Stevenson's wife Caroline (Shirley Knight) passes away while they're in the Philippine Islands in 1941 and are prisoners of the Japanese Army, and at the time of the Japanese invasion Stevenson had been a civilian pilot; and Mike Takashima, who happens to be half-Japanese and half-Polish, falls for an Algerian babe named Leila (played by French actress Daniele Gaubert who later married Jean-Claude Killy) during World War II while he was an Army paratrooper, only to lose her to a bridge explosion that occurred while his unit was ordered to withdraw. Colonel Stevenson, Lieutenant Gregg, and Sergeant Takashima are crewing one of a flight size of two Albatross rescue seaplanes dispatched to recover the Japanese survivors, including a little boy. Unfortunately the other Albatross crashes, explodes and sinks, killing all aboard. Colonel Stevenson ditches his prejudice against the Japanese, allows Sergeant Takashima to parachute, lands his Albatross and breaks his arm in the process, the survivors are on board, and Lieutenant Gregg takes off with everybody all on board, using jet-assisted turbines for assist. This was a very well-done movie, with the accompanying special visual effects done by Daiei's own effects crew; serving as special effects supervisor was an uncredited Eugene Lourie. I came across FLIGHT FROM ASHIYA on YouTube's United Video channel. Give it a view.

I'm surprised at all the tough reviews - this is essentially a movie about redemption.

(Japanese) shipwreck survivors cling to a raft in choppy Pacific seas. 2 US rescue planes arrive. The first attempts a sea-landing near the raft, but crashes and the crew are killed.

The second plane crew (Widmark, Brynner, Chakiris etc) now have to decide on making the same move but successfully, or whether to abandon the survivors to their watery fate instead (having just witnessed a failed fatal attempt by the other plane crew).

Their decision is further complicated by each man already having "issues" (about being able to rescue people without messing up and views about the Japanese as a people etc).

Their 'issues' are then separately explained in flashbacks, whilst we await their decision and outcome.

Maybe the other reviewers are all young and don't have "issues" in life yet which they have to either overcome or accept.

I liked the movie.

A tiresome "tribute" to the Air/Sea Rescue Service with all the expected platitudes dutifully delivered. The script construction is rather odd. As might be expected, there's a framing story about an Air/Sea rescue. This story runs far too long for the limited amount of interest it generates. One of the problems is that we don't know the people who are being rescued at all. Although the screenplay tries to work up a bit of interest and sympathy per medium of a young Japanese boy, this is so transparent a device (and it is too clumsily handled in dialogue, acting and direction) that it just doesn't work. Within this framing story are set three long flashbacks: Widmark has one about his lost love, and Brynner has one about his lost love. Between these two, there's another which starts off with Widmark, then diverts to Chakiris and his first encounter with Widmark! At least he lovely Daniele Gaubert prevents the film from generating total torpor – despite its moderately sized budget, location lensing and fair special effects. The movie has also two distinct photographic styles which provide some technical interest in deciding whether the atmospheric lighting is the work of Burnett Guffey and the bland material is Joseph MacDonald's contribution – or vice versa!