Ernest K. Gann has an idiosyncratic prose style, precious and precise at the same time. He tends to use a lot of interior monologue and description and he throws in little unexpected tidbits -- "And where, pray tell, is home?" Reading his work is a little like flying an airplane. Nothing much happens, but when it happens, it happens fast.
"The High and the Mighty", a novel, has just enough dialog and action to make a conventional movie. His meandering memoir, "Fate is the Hunter," has mostly a few clipped exchanges of dialog, which I guess made it next to impossible to film. In making the movie of "Fate is the Hunter," all they kept was the title, which was nice and commercial.
I haven't read Gann's "Island in the Sky", but there are enough flashbacks and narrations in the movie (by actors and by an omniscient observer who is allowed to voice Gann's finely phrased expressions) that the book must have been full of the author's reflections and the action was sparse.
The story is simple. Dooley (Wayne) is piloting a DC-3 over Canada when it ices up and he must land on a frozen lake in an unexplored woodland. His buddies get together and fly around looking for him, sometimes just barely missing him. Just as the crew's supplies are about to run out, they find him and drop supplies and note his position for a rescue team. One of the crew has frozen to death.
I saw the movie when I was a kid and thought it was great. It was shown on TV recently and it now strikes me as good rather than great because I think I have a better handle on the meaning of the word "great." Really, the movie grabs you. Very suspenseful stuff, done in a craftsmanlike manner. Will they ever find Dooley and his crew? You don't really know until the climax, although, knowing Wayne's image at the time, it would be hard to imagine that he would appear in a film that closed on a shot of him frozen stiff like the Reclining Buddha. (I mean, the guy hesitated before admitting he had lung cancer because it might damage his public image!) The location shooting around Truckee in the Sierras is nice -- black figures scuttling around on blazing white snow -- but the picture cries out for color. The crisp beauty of the setting would have contrasted with the nearly doomed situation of the crew.
It's an enjoyable movie partly because so many of the faces in it are familiar ones -- I won't bother to list them. And the performances are all pretty good, except, I suppose, we could have done without Dooley's navigator breaking into tears at his failure to specify their exact location. The scene is overacted, as are some others, and the director should have reined in the excess of statement. There are some other signs of directorial laxity. We can hear the wind whistling loudly but the branches aren't moving. Only rarely does an actor's breath turn to steam -- and it's 40 below. The scene in which the copilot freezes to death, only a few feet from the airplane, is in its own crude way heartbreaking.
The weaknesses I've mentioned probably won't bother kids any more than they bothered me when I was a kid. Good suspense, good atmosphere, decent acting, magnificent shots of airplanes over the unexplored woods of northern Canada, desperation and relief, add up to a watchable film. Worth catching.
"The High and the Mighty", a novel, has just enough dialog and action to make a conventional movie. His meandering memoir, "Fate is the Hunter," has mostly a few clipped exchanges of dialog, which I guess made it next to impossible to film. In making the movie of "Fate is the Hunter," all they kept was the title, which was nice and commercial.
I haven't read Gann's "Island in the Sky", but there are enough flashbacks and narrations in the movie (by actors and by an omniscient observer who is allowed to voice Gann's finely phrased expressions) that the book must have been full of the author's reflections and the action was sparse.
The story is simple. Dooley (Wayne) is piloting a DC-3 over Canada when it ices up and he must land on a frozen lake in an unexplored woodland. His buddies get together and fly around looking for him, sometimes just barely missing him. Just as the crew's supplies are about to run out, they find him and drop supplies and note his position for a rescue team. One of the crew has frozen to death.
I saw the movie when I was a kid and thought it was great. It was shown on TV recently and it now strikes me as good rather than great because I think I have a better handle on the meaning of the word "great." Really, the movie grabs you. Very suspenseful stuff, done in a craftsmanlike manner. Will they ever find Dooley and his crew? You don't really know until the climax, although, knowing Wayne's image at the time, it would be hard to imagine that he would appear in a film that closed on a shot of him frozen stiff like the Reclining Buddha. (I mean, the guy hesitated before admitting he had lung cancer because it might damage his public image!) The location shooting around Truckee in the Sierras is nice -- black figures scuttling around on blazing white snow -- but the picture cries out for color. The crisp beauty of the setting would have contrasted with the nearly doomed situation of the crew.
It's an enjoyable movie partly because so many of the faces in it are familiar ones -- I won't bother to list them. And the performances are all pretty good, except, I suppose, we could have done without Dooley's navigator breaking into tears at his failure to specify their exact location. The scene is overacted, as are some others, and the director should have reined in the excess of statement. There are some other signs of directorial laxity. We can hear the wind whistling loudly but the branches aren't moving. Only rarely does an actor's breath turn to steam -- and it's 40 below. The scene in which the copilot freezes to death, only a few feet from the airplane, is in its own crude way heartbreaking.
The weaknesses I've mentioned probably won't bother kids any more than they bothered me when I was a kid. Good suspense, good atmosphere, decent acting, magnificent shots of airplanes over the unexplored woods of northern Canada, desperation and relief, add up to a watchable film. Worth catching.