The Phoenix's Flight

In another installment of the "movies that have shown up in the FXM rotation recently and are on again", there's the 1965 version of The Flight of the Phoenix. Its next showing is at 12:35 PM tomorrow, followed by another one at 3:30 AM Thursday.

Frank Towns (James Stewart) is a pilot flying an old airplane in parlous shape togethr with his co-pilot Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) for Aramco, the oil company operating in various parts of the Middle East. In this case, they're flying from a rig somewhere in the Sahara up to Benghazi, this being a few years before Qaddafi led the coup that changed Libya's history. Considering what they say about the plane itself, the fact that the radio is out, and this is in a sequence before the opening credits, you know something bad is about to happen.

Sure enough, something does when a sandstorm hits. The sand clogs up the carburetor, making the propellers stop and forcing the plane into a crash landing. Worse, cargo falls from where it's been secured, killing two passengers instantly and fatally injuring a third.

The plane has landed off course, in the middle of the Sahara, with no radio, and with nobody knowing for several hours that something's happened to the plane. The only good thing is that among the cargo, there was a supply of pressed dates, so at least the passengers and crew don't have to worry about running out of food. They do, however, have to worry about running out of water, which is much more serious.

Towns is technically boss as his first duty is to the plane and keeping his passengers safe. However, one of the passengers is a former British army officer, Captain Harris (Peter Finch). He just knows he's going to be able to find the oasis that's "only" 30 miles or so away, through a featureless landscape with everybody having no idea where they are. The alternative, of course, is staying where they are and hoping somebody finds them before the water runs out, which doesn't seem appealing either.

Over Towns' objection, Harris eventually sets out with Carlos, leaving behind his underling Sgt. Watson (Ronald Fraser) who picked up a slight injury making him unable to take a trek through the desert. The rest of the men settle in for a long wait that's probably going to result in their deaths unless they're extremely lucky....

Or if somebody can come up with an absolutely ridiculous idea. Another of the passengers is Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger). He's a German aircraft designer, and he's done the calculations to conclude that there is a way out of this mess: they can take the parts of the plane that survived the crash, move a wing here, a propeller there, and soon enough, they'll have a plane that at least can fly to that oasis where they can be rescued. It is, of course, nuts, and since World War II is fresh in people's memories, there's some question of whether or not they should trust Dorfmann. But the alternative is to have no hope, so perhaps doing something is the least bad thing.

As you can guess, there's a lot of difficulty along the way, as the other passengers aren't necessarily as fit for labor as Dorfmann's calculations would have them being. There are further complications involving whether or not Towns can let Dorfmann have authority, or whether a group of Bedouins that pass a couple of dunes over might actually be bandits who would just as soon kill all the non-Arabs.

Flight of the Phoenix isn't a bad little movie if you can get past the idea that the plot is so ludicrous that nothing like this could happen in real life. They'd all be long dead. Although there's nominally the action of trying to build the plane, much like the bridge in Bridge on the River Kwai, the story is just as much about the psychology of the interaction among the various stranded people in a time of disaster. There are also shades of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat what with a German who may not be fully trustworthy amid that disaster.

I thought that FXM's airing might be panned and scanned since it fills up the 16:9 screen, but IMDb claims that the movie was originally filmed in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and not Cinemascope, so at most there's a little bit off the sides. The movie itself got a DVD release, although that seems to be out of print. There was also a remake in 2004, and that one also got a DVD release that seems to be out of print too. Both versions seem to be available on Amazon Prime streaming video.