It's difficult to believe that it's possible to make a dull movie about an airliner ditching at sea but they manage to pull of such a feat here.
I'm not sure what makes it as pedestrian as it is. I'm actually thankful for the negligible attention paid to the usual diverse group of passengers. There's only one flashback, and that deals with the captain's (Gary Merrill's) taking leave of his wife, Nancy Davis. Merrill is a pilot for Gonococcal International Airways. There's no particular point to the flashback, but then there seems to be little point to most of the incidents we see. The second officer has a romance of about two minutes with the usual supernally beautiful stewardess. There's another one of those annoying children aboard. This one has a dog, worse luck, and it must be saved at the last minute.
The movie seems filled with all sorts of padding. It's as if someone had given the director a script that would take about half an hour to shoot, and instructed him to fill up an hour and a half with it.
Gary Merrill is probably the best-known face in the movie, and what a face it is. It seems made for the camera, with its manifold creases in its cheeks, its wide supple lips, its overall inexpressiveness. He doesn't put much into the part. He has two engines quit on him in the middle of the Atlantic and at his most anxious he looks as if he's having a duel of wits with a claw machine. Others try to act, it seems, but some of them can't really act very well. The captain and men of the destroyer escort look exactly like experienced Hollywood bit players.
Let's see. This was released in 1958. The events as described correspond fairly well to a real crash landing at sea, in the Pacific, midway between Honolulu and San Francisco, in 1956. Gary Merrill even remarks about a "previous ditching" in which the tail broke off, which actually took place. And, in real life as in the film, the airplane had 25 passengers, canaries on board, and the rescue ship radioed that they have bacon and eggs waiting. I remember it vividly because I was a radio operator in the Coast Guard at the time and happened to be the first person in the states to learn of the pending crash. The Coast Guard cutter involved in the rescue was the Pontchartrain. I understand a clip is available on YouTube.
Still, even knowing that this was a fictionalized version of an event I participated in wasn't enough to keep my mind from drifting. Everyone in the film appeared kind of distracted too, so I didn't feel especially guilty. The general impression is that those who greenlighted this project thought the emergency, fresh in the public mind, was enough to carry the picture, so they put little else into it.
I'm not sure what makes it as pedestrian as it is. I'm actually thankful for the negligible attention paid to the usual diverse group of passengers. There's only one flashback, and that deals with the captain's (Gary Merrill's) taking leave of his wife, Nancy Davis. Merrill is a pilot for Gonococcal International Airways. There's no particular point to the flashback, but then there seems to be little point to most of the incidents we see. The second officer has a romance of about two minutes with the usual supernally beautiful stewardess. There's another one of those annoying children aboard. This one has a dog, worse luck, and it must be saved at the last minute.
The movie seems filled with all sorts of padding. It's as if someone had given the director a script that would take about half an hour to shoot, and instructed him to fill up an hour and a half with it.
Gary Merrill is probably the best-known face in the movie, and what a face it is. It seems made for the camera, with its manifold creases in its cheeks, its wide supple lips, its overall inexpressiveness. He doesn't put much into the part. He has two engines quit on him in the middle of the Atlantic and at his most anxious he looks as if he's having a duel of wits with a claw machine. Others try to act, it seems, but some of them can't really act very well. The captain and men of the destroyer escort look exactly like experienced Hollywood bit players.
Let's see. This was released in 1958. The events as described correspond fairly well to a real crash landing at sea, in the Pacific, midway between Honolulu and San Francisco, in 1956. Gary Merrill even remarks about a "previous ditching" in which the tail broke off, which actually took place. And, in real life as in the film, the airplane had 25 passengers, canaries on board, and the rescue ship radioed that they have bacon and eggs waiting. I remember it vividly because I was a radio operator in the Coast Guard at the time and happened to be the first person in the states to learn of the pending crash. The Coast Guard cutter involved in the rescue was the Pontchartrain. I understand a clip is available on YouTube.
Still, even knowing that this was a fictionalized version of an event I participated in wasn't enough to keep my mind from drifting. Everyone in the film appeared kind of distracted too, so I didn't feel especially guilty. The general impression is that those who greenlighted this project thought the emergency, fresh in the public mind, was enough to carry the picture, so they put little else into it.