The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

James Stewart: Frank Towns

Photos 

Quotes 

• Frank Towns : If you hadn't made a career out of being a drunk you might not have been a second-rate navigator in a firth-rate outfit. And if you'd not stayed in your bunk to kill that last bottle, maybe you might have checked that engineer's report on the radio and we might not be here now. All right!

• Frank Towns : I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.

  Lew Moran : All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.

• Heinrich Dorfmann : Gentlemen, I have been examining this aeroplane.

  Frank Towns : Yeah?

  Heinrich Dorfmann : Yes. We've everything we need here to build a new one and fly it out. Now, if you'd like to have a look at my calculations, I don't know whether you can read my handwriting.

  Frank Towns : Are you trying to be funny?

  Heinrich Dorfmann : What did you say?

  Frank Towns : I said, are you trying to be funny?

  Heinrich Dorfmann : That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations.

• Frank Towns : Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there- Flying used to be fun, Lew, it really was.

• Frank Towns : He's crazy, Lew... he builds toy airplanes.

• Frank Towns : Your theory's fine, but you get this mister... that engine's rated at two thousand horsepower and if I was ever fool enough to let it get started up it'd shake your patched-up pile of junk into a thousand pieces, and cut us up into mincemeat with the propeller.

• Frank Towns : [One great and rather prescient line comes from Frank Towns]  "The little men with the slide rules and computers are going to inherit the earth".

• Dr. Renaud : [the plane has just crashed and two men are dead. Dr. Renaud offers Frank a Bible]  Would you like to say something?

  Frank Towns : Like what? Sorry?