Neat-o programmer about a small passenger plane going down in a jungle near a tribe of head-hunters. Yikes! Everyone’s a character in this smartly plotted GRAND HOTEL on a Plane story directed by John Farrow (not bad John!), working on airless studio-bound R.K.O. sets, off an original script by Nathanael (DAY OF THE LOCUST) West a year before his premature death, along with Dalton Trumbo & Jerome Cady. Piloted by one-time WWI ace Chester Morris, the plane carries newsworthy elopers Patrick Knowles (rich) & Wendy Barrie (pretty); a big-shot gangster’s 5-yr-old boy guarded by henchman Allen Jenkins; scheduled-to-hang prisoner Joseph Calleia escorted by John Carradine; retired couple C. Aubrey Smith & Elisabeth Risdon; plus wandering tart Lucille Ball. (Lucy wonderful and startlingly beautiful in the broken-dame dramatic turns she often played at the time.) One of those films that shouldn’t work at all, but thanks to the Hollywood Factory æsthetic, is all of a piece, which makes it easy to swallow. Also easy to watch under Nicholas Musuraca’s lighting, later R.K.O.’s go-to film noir D.P. master. Something that can’t be said of Farrow’s less rigorously stylized remake 20 years on (BACK FROM ETERNITY/’56*) from the dying days of Howard Hughes’ moribund R.K.O.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *For a more realistic take on the Downed Plane Must be Fixed to Save Survivors formula, try Robert Aldrich’s all-star THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’66. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/flight-of-phoenix-1966.html
No comments:
Post a Comment