Back from Eternity

It's been over 14 years since I blogged about the Lucill Ball movie Five Came Back. I knew that it was remade in the 1950s, and that the remake, titled Back from Eternity, showed up a lot on TCM because both versions were made at RKO. But, for whatever reason, I had never watched Back from Eternity before. So the most recent time it showed up, I finally recorded it so that I could do a post on it here.

Having already seen Five Came Back, I already knew the basic plot of the movie. Robert Ryan stars as Bill Lonagan, pilot for an airline that's reduced to flying Americans down to some tinpot little South American country, in this case with the fictional capital city of Boca Grande. On this particular flight, he's got a new co-pilot in Joe Brooks (Keith Andes). There's also the motley assortment of character types on this particular flight, all of them with back stories, but with those stories not always being the reason they're on the flight. The Spanglers (Beulah Bondi and Cameron Prud'Homme) are the elderly couple where the husband is a college professor taking a research trip; Jud (Gene Brooks) is a wealthy businessman engaged to Louise (Phyllis Kirk); young Tommy is the son of a gangster who has just been killed, with one of the gangster's underlings, Boswick (Jessie White) taking him out of the country to shield young Tommy from the news; Rena (Antia Ekberg) is the requisite woman of ill repute being sent to South America; and Vasquel (Rod Steiger) is a political revolutionary wanted in Boca Grande and who is to be delivered there by Crimp (Fred Clark).

The various passengers already start having interactions on the way down to Boca Grande, such as one reading a newspaper that has a story on the death of Tommy's father. Prof. Spangler also mentions the natives they'll be flying over, a bunch of headhunter types who have a way of shrinking the heads of the people they capture and turning them into talismans. The exposition is also a form of foreshadowing, as you might be able to figure out even if you hadn't seen the movie Five Came Back and didn't know the plot synopsis of the movie. Soon enough, the plane hits rough weather, and you know that's going to drive the plot.

Sure enough, the plane is forced to crash land, and the plane is somewhat damaged. The radio, for example, is no longer working, while one of the engines went out. However, it's not so damaged that the plane is irreparable. They might be able to fix it just enough to get off the ground again and go to their destination. And they're going to have to do that too, since they're way off course and nobody is going to know exactly where they went down in the storm.

Time is of the essence, as they didn't pack enough food for the reason that they didn't expect to be in the jungle for possibly weeks. More importantly, though, are those headhunters they only expected to be flying over. You have to know that they're going to figure out these Americans are in their midst, and they're not going to let the Americans stay there peaceably. And to make matters worse, the characters begin to have conflicts with one another. Louise looks like she might like co-pilot Joe more than she does her fiancé, while Jud, Vasquel, and pilot Bill don't see eye to eye on who should be in charge.

And then when the plane does get repaired, there's a catch. It's been damaged enough that the plane will only be able to take five passengers to Boca Grande. And who should have the power to make those life and death decisions?

Back from Eternity isn't a bad movie, and it would probably have a better reputation if it were an original story instead of being a remake of a movie made in Hollywood's annus mirabilis of 1939. It also has a bit of a TV movie feel in terms of production values, having been made near what was the end of the road for RKO. Still, the acting is pretty good, and the movie is definitely worth a watch.