Jimmy Stewart flew 20 combat missions in WWII, so he seems a natural choice as a pilot in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix. What doesn’t seem so natural is this is a rougher, harder Stewart than we have seen before.
Before this picture, there had been glimpses of a range beyond his “aw shucks” persona. He is downright terrifying in the final sequence of Vertigo, when all his suppressed rage comes to a boil. He also did some westerns where he plays an honorable citizen who finally has had enough of outlaws. But his worn and weary pilot for an oil company operating in Libya is something else, indeed. This is the only time I have seen him so downright surly.
The plane he is flying crashes in the desert even before the opening credits. There are quite a few recognizable names and faces among the passengers: Ernest Borgnine, Peter Finch, George Kennedy, Ian Bannen and Dan Duryea to name a few.
But the film’s best, and most critical, performance is Richard Attenborough as Stewart’s sole crew member and jack of all trades. Attenborough adopts a slight stammer here and employs it sporadically for maximum impact. In the conflicts to come, this seemingly unremarkable man will be the only person capable of interacting with every other survivor. I know this movie was remade once already, and I don’t care to see that, but they should seriously consider Toby Jones for the Attenborough role if they ever remake it again. Jones’s performance in The Mist has many similarities to this.
The plane had gone off course before the crash, and Stewart had been unable to make radio contact even before then. So, even if anybody is looking for them, they will be looking in the wrong place.
This sets up a number of conflicts, though I did not anticipate some of the directions the script went in, nor did I foresee the evolution of some of the characters.
Peter Finch is a high-ranking British Army official, with Ronald Fraser as his Sergeant. Finch decides to take Fraser on a march across the desert until they find somebody. Fraser fakes an ankle injury, which I thought was a decent comic moment until it turns out this is the first hint of darker undercurrents in his personality.
Similarly, Hardy Kruger is a German aircraft engineer whose aloofness foreshadows trouble ahead. But Kruger isn’t planning any sort of treason. Instead, he has a plan to make a new plane out of the salvageable parts from the crash. This pits him against Stewart in a youth vs experience conflict.
The photography is beautiful, but then I pity somebody who can’t make sand dunes look good on the big screen. Dialogue is good throughout, but at times it is too clever for its characters, such as when Duryea speculates on insurance investigators finding them since “Insurance companies are like God. They also move in mysterious ways, but they’re not as generous.”
Most noteworthy is the makeup. Over the course of several days in the desert with very little water, every man becomes realistically blighted with peeling skin and scabbed-over splits in their lips. It is so effective that it is a bit painful to look at them in closeup. But the most shocking makeup effect occurs towards the end and both the nature of the violence and the resulting effect is startling, especially for 1965.
Flight of the Phoenix ends up over-staying its welcome by at least a quarter-hour, though I’m not sure what I would trim. With a solid ensemble cast led by Stewart, and a premise that spawns some interesting possibilities, this is a movie I can recommend for everybody.
Dir: Robert Aldrich
Starring Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Hardy Kruger
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray