So, I opted for Flight of the Phoenix last night. It is not, to my knowledge, on my Fill-in Filmography. I just thought it sounded cool, and I vaguely recall someone made a remake in 2004 (I haven’t seen the new one). One thing that did jump out at me was the cast though. This is an international cast where the German guy is played by a German actor, the French doctor is played by a French actor, and so forth. Yeah, Jimmy Stewart got top billing as he probably should, and I did recognize a couple American character actors. But yeah, they got an international cast to play people from different countries while today even big Hollywood studios would just get an American or at least a British actor to do another accent. Did Hollywood just decide to stop doing that at some point?
Eh, it may not matter. This is a classic sort of survival story.
Pilot Frank Towns (Harris) is flying a group of men across the desert from one part of Libya to another. Most of the passengers work for an oil company, but there are also a pair of British military men, a French doctor, and a German engineer. Towns is basically flying solo as his navigator Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) is something of an alcoholic. However, a sudden sandstorm hits and forces the plane down. Some of the passengers die, one is badly injured, they crashed far away from just about everything, and there are a number of factors that would make trekking across the desert to find a way to safety difficult if not downright impossible. Since it was just supposed to be a short flight, the survivors don’t have much in the way of either food or water.
But there may be a way out for the survivors (and one guy’s pet monkey) to get out of the desert when all other methods fall short. The German engineer Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) works with planes, and after spending some time doing some math and checking to see what’s left over in one piece after the crash, he determines that it would be possible to build a new plane out of the wreckage of the old. Towns is doubtful, but he’s very old fashioned in his way of doing things. Meanwhile, Dorfmann basically just takes charge, an action that rubs Towns the wrong way in every way possible, and forcing Moran to act as the reasonable go-between. During all this, the other survivors do what they can to stay alive, and the movie is not afraid to kill off a few more of them during the course of the movie.
OK, the basic conflict between the old pro that is possibly past his prime and the young hotshot with a new way of doing things may be old hat, but it’s old hat that, when done right, works. And here, it works. Stewart’s Towns gets most of the screentime, and his reasoning for doubting Dorfmann comes more from a personal stubbornness even he is aware of as he comes to understand that time is passing him by. It doesn’t help that Dorfmann is played as a very stereotypical German, a cold man who seems to operate solely off math and logic while looking down his nose at the others, people he needs to complete his plans, is a very hard man to like. It’s a small wonder the others didn’t murder him before he finished the plane.
That said, I did like how the movie gave time to give many of the survivors a scene or two to expand their characters, giving some vivid personalities to some, not all of whom get out of the desert alive. It’s mostly a story of survival where a group of men are put into a stressful situation and have to deal with it. Seriously, the only women in the movie are a voice on the radio and a half-transparent hallucination. But the movie works, especially a late movie reveal on something Dorfmann hasn’t exactly been hiding but no one really asked him about either. Besides, if you need an everyman, Jimmy Stewart is always good for that sort of thing. The fact that he’s continually called an old man when he would go on to live another thirty years or so…well, it’s a movie, and a well-done one at that.
Grade: A-
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