by Mike Gray
Once upon a brief time, one of the hottest authors in Hollywood was Ernest K. Gann (1910-91). He wrote a lot about aviation topics, and since I’m an airplane fan I must’ve read all of his books and seen all the films adapted from them. Here’s a list of his Hollywood efforts with flying as a background (from IMDb):
– Blaze of Noon (1947)
– Island in the Sky (1953)
– The High and the Mighty (1954)
– Fate Is the Hunter (1964)
– The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark (1981)
– The Aviator (1985)
One of my favorite Gann films is Fate Is the Hunter (20th Century-Fox, 1964, 106 minutes), which combines a mystery with a disaster.
Rod Taylor plays a perhaps too laid-back airline pilot who dies in what is later described as a “blue ribbon crash”; the only survivor of the disaster is one of the stewardesses (Suzanne Pleshette), who is badly injured. Making matters worse, witnesses recall seeing pilot Taylor pub-crawling just before takeoff.
Taylor’s war-time “buddy” is Glenn Ford, who also works for the same airline flying a desk. Despite a personal antipathy towards Taylor, Ford feels that Taylor just couldn’t have caused the crash; Ford is convinced his “pal” was simply too good a pilot.
Most of the movie is taken up in flashbacks to World War Two, where we see Taylor’s apparent recklessness reinacted—and the reasons for Ford’s resentments. The more Ford delves into Taylor’s past, the worse it looks for Taylor.
When Ford testifies at the National Transportation Safety Board hearing that it must have been the “time to die” for the 53 passengers on the plane, his bosses urge he be fired. Only the CEO is willing to listen to Ford—and that reluctantly—when Ford proposes a re-enactment of the crash, only this time with sacks of sand and not real people. It takes all he can do for Ford to get Pleshette to become involved in the test, since she’s suffering from the emotional scars of the tragedy.
But it’s a good thing she goes along for the ride, because it’s through her and her slowly recovering memory that the real cause of this “blue ribbon” crash will be revealed.
(Tech note: The aircraft used in the film was an old DC-4 [military version: C-54], which originally had two piston engines on each wing. In the movie, these engines were removed and replaced by two turbojets positioned under the tailplane, making it look superficially like a DC-9 short-range commuter.)
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Ernest K. Gann films on Amazon.com:
– The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark
Ernest K. Gann books on Amazon.com:
