Fate is the Hunter (1964)

Fate is the Hunter, released in 1964, is a kind of aviation disaster movie (a favourite genre of mine) and also a kind of mystery. And fate may or may not be a crucial factor.

An airliner crashes a few minutes after taking off from Los Angeles. 53 passengers and crew are killed. Due to a couple of unexpected misfortunes the cause of the crash is not easy to determine. The aircraft’s flight recorder was destroyed. There are audio tapes of messages passed between the doomed airliner and ground control but the messages end at a vital moment, apparently due to a radio failure. The evidence, such as it is, is ambiguous.

The airline’s flight director, Sam McBane (Glenn Ford), believes that the pilot is, quite unfairly, going to be blamed.

There is evidence that one of the aircraft’s two engines exploded. That evidence is strong but not absolute. There is some evidence that the second engine failed as well but the evidence for that is more shaky.

So much of the evidence is not merely ambiguous but puzzling. The second engine was later found to be entirely undamaged but a survivor insists that both cockpit warning lights were on, indicating failure of both engines. That survivor is one of the stewardesses, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette). Martha is a sensible young woman. She is an experienced stewardess and is therefore perfectly well aware of the meaning of the cockpit warning lights. As a stewardess she has been trained to keep her head in a crisis. She did not suffer any head injuries. There is no reason to think that she was likely to be confused or in a panic. Sam is very much inclined to believe her story even though it conflicts with other evidence.

This was 1964, a time when flying was still glamorous and exciting. ln those happy days airliners had no flight attendants. They had stewardesses. The stewardesses were pretty, because having pretty airline stewardesses made flying seem more glamorous. They were well-trained and extremely competent. They just happened to be pretty as well. It is clear that Martha Webster is very good at her job and very professional.

The worrying thing is the suggestion that the pilot, Jack Savage (Rod Taylor), may have been drinking shortly before the flight. Sam does not believe this could have been the case. On the other hand we have to take into account Sam’s fierce loyalty to his pilots, and the fact that he and the pilot were old friends. He had been Jack’s co-pilot during the war. To complicate things, Sam’s attitude towards Jack is a bit ambivalent - a mixture of hero-worship and disapproval. Sam considers Jack to have been an outstanding pilot, but perhaps less outstanding as a man.

This movie was made at a fascinating time in Hollywood history. The Production Code was crumbling rapidly. The studios were tentatively experimenting with a radical new concept - making movies that took a grown-up attitude towards sex. Jack’s sex life becomes an important plot point. He sees to have shared his bed with a succession of attractive young ladies. If a decision is made to cast Jack as the scapegoat the newspapers will certainly suggest that he was a man of dubious sexual morals, and they are likely to suggest that a man with such a deplorable lack of sexual self-restraint might have a similar lack of self-restraint when it comes to booze.

It is possible that Jack will be judged not on his skills as a pilot but on his morals. And it is obvious that the press is gunning for Jack.

Glenn Ford is in fine form as a decent man who might possibly be allowing his personal feelings to interfere with his judgment. Ford could play tortured characters extremely well without resorting to Method acting histrionics. The underrated Rod Taylor is also excellent as another man who might have been wrestling with some inner demons. These are the two performances that matter.

Suzanne Pleshette is very solid, and Nancy Kwan and Constance Towers are very good as two of Jack’s girlfriends. It’s fun to see Jane Russell doing a cameo as herself. It’s also fun that her garters are important pieces of evidence!

There are a lot of flashbacks which give us insights into the personalities of both Jack and Sam.

This is a movie that plays fair with the viewer. A sufficiently alert viewer can certainly solve the mystery before Sam does (I did).

This movie was based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann who also wrote the source novels for two of the best aviation disaster thriller movies ever made, The High and the Mighty (1954) and Island in the Sky (1953).

Fate is the Hunter is both a fine aviation thriller and a decent puzzle movie. Highly recommended.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray which offers a superb transfer and includes both Spanish and English language versions (the latter with removable Spanish subtitles). I can recommend this Blu-Ray without any reservations.

Rollercoaster (1977)

Rollercoaster (1977) is included in Universal’s Ultimate Disaster Pack DVD set but I’m not sure I’d call it a disaster movie. It has some elements we associate with that genre but I’d call it a suspense thriller.

What attracted me to this movie initially is that the screenplay was written by Richard Levinson and William Link. They’re best known for their work in television - these were the guys who created Columbo, Ellery Queen (one of my all-time favourite TV series) and Murder, She Wrote. I figured that if they were involved then Rollercoaster might turn out to be interesting.

It starts with a tragic accident at an amusement park. The rollercoaster collapsed (in a thrilling and well executed sequence) and a number of people were killed.

Harry Calder (George Segal) isn’t happy about this. He’s an inspector with the Safety and Standards department and he was the one who carried out the routine inspection on that rollercoaster a few weeks earlier. He doesn’t think this accident really was an accident.

Being a curious guy he does a bit of digging. There have been other recent amusement park accidents that seem slightly suspicious. Harry is not just a curious guy, he’s a guy who knows how to follow a trail and the trail leads him to the heads of five companies which owned the amusement parks that suffered accidents. What really interests Harry is why these five company heads are having a secret meeting in Chicago. He decides to crash their private party and that’s how he discovers that these amusement parks have been targeted by an extortionist who wants a million dollars.

Harry is not the kind of guy who hankers to be a lone wolf hero type. He immediately contacts the FBI. Special Agent Hoyt (Richard Widmark) takes over the investigation. Hoyt is a prickly character who doesn’t amateurs getting involved in his cases. Which is fine by Harry. He’s done his duty. And then comes a phone call from the extortionist. He insists that Harry should be the one who delivers the million dollars. Harry is going to be in the middle of this case whether he and Hoyt like it or not.

The money drop will be made at another amusement park. The FBI will be waiting but this extortionist isn’t easy to trap.

The movie’s climax comes when an another rollercoaster disaster is threatened.

The audience saw the extortionist right at the start of the movie and we soon learn that his motivation is very simple - he just wants money. So there’s no great mystery. This is a pure suspense movie.

The opening rollercoaster disaster is one of the three very long very effective suspense sequences that occupy most of the movie’s running time.

These sequences are intricate and elaborate, with the tension being ratcheted up remorselessly. They’re imaginative and superbly executed.

There’s not much focus on characterisation and this is deliberate. It’s the suspense sequence that matter. This is a suspense thriller not a psychological thriller. The only psychological angle is that the extortionist is an obsessive who goes to extraordinary lengths to make his plans fool-proof. He always has a backup plan. Since Harry makes his living as a safety inspector his mind works in much the same way. You check something, you check it again, and then you check it a third time to make sure. Harry understands how the extortionist’s mind works. He despises the extortionist as a cold-blooded killer but he respects the guy’s intelligence and attention to detail.

Harry is no tortured hero. He’s divorced but he gets on fine with his ex-wife, he gets to see his daughter regularly and he has a nice new girlfriend. George Segal’s easy-going likeable performance is a major asset. Timothy Bottoms is nicely arrogant and calculating as the unnamed extortionist.

I’ve never liked Richard Widmark much but he’s very good here as Hoyt, a cynical professional with one minor weakness - he tends to underestimate his quarry and he underestimates Harry.

The Ultimate Disaster Pack DVD set also includes The Hindenburg (which I watched recently), Airport (a movie I’ve always loved) and Earthquake (a firm favourite of mine). The DVD transfer is 16:9 enhanced and looks great. It’s a DVD set worth getting hold of.

Rollercoaster really is a superbly made rollercoaster ride of suspense and excitement. Highly recommended.

The Hindenburg (1975)

The 1970s was the decade of the disaster movie so it was probably inevitable that sooner or later someone would make a movie about the Hindenburg disaster. Robert Wise got the job and The Hindenburg came out in 1975.

It posed a few challenges. Movies like Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure dealt with disasters that unfold over a long time period. A lot of the running time of those movies was taken up by the disasters. The Hindenburg disaster took minutes. So how do you fill a two-hour running time? The obvious answer was to turn it into a suspense movie by introducing the idea of a possible plot to blow up the giant airship. Most of the movie can then be occupied by efforts to uncover and foil the plot.

The second problem was the same one that faces anyone making a movie about the Titanic. The audience knows how the story is going to end, they know that disaster cannot be averted. The Hindenburg solves that problem by focusing not on the disaster itself but on the why and the how. The central character is German Air Force intelligence officer Colonel Franz Ritter (George C. Scott) who has been given the job of security officer. His job is the make sure that the Hindenburg’s voyage is completed safely.

The third problem is that the story will have to be told mostly from the German viewpoint. Therefore the movie goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that Colonel Ritter is a Good German who hates the Nazis. The movie covers itself even more thoroughly by persuading us that the Zeppelin company who built the Hindenburg is also run by Good Germans who hate the Nazis.

Richard Levinson and William Link provided the story. These were the men responsible for the superb 1970s Ellery Queen TV series, and Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. They should have been capable of coming up with a decent plot, and in fact the core plot is reasonably good.

The Hindenburg is about to take off on a flight from Frankfurt to New York. An anonymous letter is received, claiming that the zeppelin is going to be blown up. For prestige reasons the flight can’t be cancelled but elaborate precautions are taken. The airship is searched thoroughly and as well as Ritter there is a Gestapo man assigned to help his investigations during the flight.

With a saboteur loose on board there was the potential for mystery, suspense and action but the potential isn’t realised. The identity of the saboteur is revealed too early and is in fact blindingly obvious right from the start - nobody else has a motive.

This makes the other passengers rather uninteresting since we know they’re not involved in the conspiracy. They’re just there to play out subplots to pad out the running time. And at 125 minutes this movie is much much too long. These other characters are also very poorly developed. There’s a pianist who is only there so he can sing an anti-Hitler song in a musical interlude with is embarrassing, heavy-handed and out-of-place. It belongs in a Mel Brooks movie. Some of the other characters serve even less purpose.

The one character who should have been interesting is the German countess played by Anne Bancroft. She and Ritter have a history. There should have been some romantic tension between them, but it doesn’t happen. It’s a pity. Bancroft is very good (probably the best thing in the movie) but the script doesn’t give her enough to work with. We really need Ritter and the Countess to care about each other, to give the movie at least some emotional content.

There are some good character actors here (including Gig Young and Burgess Meredith) but the only one who impresses is Charles Durning as the captain of the Hindenburg, largely because he’s the only character with a slight amount of depth.

Roy Thinnes is OK as the movie’s token Nazi, Gestapo agent Martin Vogel, but the character is just a standard movie Nazi.

Wise makes the odd decision to switch to black-and-white once disaster strikes. This was so he could intercut actual newsreel footage with new footage. It’s jarring and it totally destroys the suspension of disbelief. The viewer loses interest because the movie no longer seems real. The disaster, rather than being the climax of the movie, becomes a sort of epilogue.

The special effects are mostly good. It’s a handsome-looking movie. The zeppelin model looks great. The shots of the Zeppelin’s interior are effective and atmospheric.

Nothing could have saved the Hindenburg but the movie could have been saved. The script just needed a lot more work. The minor characters needed to be fleshed out just a little. The major characters needed to be more fully developed. And a bit of action here and there wouldn’t have hurt - surely the hunt for a saboteur could have generated at least one action sequence. A bit more urgency was needed. The basic plot idea was however perfectly sound.

The Hindenburg really is strictly for disaster movie completists.

Jet Storm (1959)

Jet Storm is an aviation disaster movie but in several interesting ways it differs from most movies of this type. This British production was released in 1959.

Thirty-two passengers are about to board an airliner in London en route to New York. One of the passengers, Ernest Tilley (Richard Attenborough), seems a bit distracted. He has good reason to be. He has just spotted a man about to board the same aircraft. He has been searching for this man for two years. He knew the man would be taking this flight but now he has confirmation. The man is James Brock (George Rose) and he was responsible for the death of Ernest Tilley’s seven-year-old daughter in a hit-and-run accident.

Not long after take-off two other passengers overhear Tilley talking to his wife. What they hear disturbs them enough to cause them to inform the pilot, Captain Bardow (Stanley Baker). Tilley was telling his wife that James Brock was about to die.

After speaking to Tilley it is obvious to Bardow that Tilley, an explosives expert, has planted a bomb aboard the plane. He intends to kill James Brock, and everyone else on board. Tilley blames the whole world for the death of his daughter, his bitterness exacerbated by his belief that Brock escaped justice through bribery. Bardow’s problem is that he has no way of knowing how Tilley intends to trigger the bomb so Tilley will have to be approached very carefully. Given his expertise in explosives it is likely that Tilley has designed his bomb with a remote control detonating device and any attempt to rush him, or threaten him, is likely to result in the immediate detonation of the bomb.

This movie is a skillful exercise in slow-burning suspense. At first no-one takes Tilley seriously. They assume he is merely making empty verbal threats. It gradually dawns on the passengers and crew that Tilley is dead serious and that his threats are anything but empty.

This movie does not quite follow the usual aviation disaster movie formula. While there is plenty of nail-biting suspense the real emphasis here is on the psychological reactions of the passengers. Thirty-two people suddenly find themselves facing possible imminent death. How will they react? As it turns out some deal with the situation with courage and cheerfulness. Others react with cowardice, selfishness, stupidity and viciousness. Tilley wants to kill everyone aboard because he believes that people are worthless and that when they discover they are about to die they will reveal themselves as corrupt and vicious and cowardly. In the case of about half the passengers his assessment is spot on. The question then becomes - can those passengers who behave bravely and decently somehow convince Tilley that people are worth saving?

And can the passengers who keep their nerve prevent those who have lost theirs from doing something foolish that will result in everyone’s death?

This film also departs from the usual formula in that the crew are not heroic paragons of virtue who save the day through their incredible skill and bravery. Captain Bardow is brave and he is very competent but no amount of flying skill is going to make any difference. Any attempt by the crew, no matter how brave and self-sacrificing they might be, to take any overt action against Tilley will simply cause him to blow up the aircraft immediately.

If the airliner and those aboard are to be saved it’s going to require a more subtle and indirect approach.

Richard Attenborough made a career out of playing vulnerable and/or damaged characters  and he’s wise enough to underplay his performance, which has the effect of making Tilley much more menacing. Tilley is just the sort of quiet inoffensive little man who might blow up an aircraft. Stanley Baker is excellent, as always. The support cast is a galaxy of wonderful British character actors. They’re all good and it’s almost unfair to single anyone out although special mention must be made of Dame Sybil Thorndike and also Elizabeth Sellars’ performance as the cool and aristocratic Inez Barrington. 

Interestingly enough the airliner portrayed in the film is a Russian Tupolev Tu-104. At the time the film was made the only other jet airliner in service was the British de Havilland Comet but given the series of well-publicised and disastrous crashes suffered by the British aircraft the producers might have thought that using a Comet for the film would be in poor taste.

Writer-director Cy Endfield went on to achieve huge success a few years later with Zulu. There are in fact intriguing parallels between the two movies - in both cases you have a potentially disastrous situation in which courage alone is not enough to save the day. Courage is certainly required, but it has to be combined with coolness and discipline. 

Jet Storm is not just one of the best aviation disaster movies it’s also a complex and engrossing psychological drama. Very entertaining and highly recommended.

The High and the Mighty (1954)

The High and the Mighty is the grand-daddy of all disaster movies. It was made in 1954 but every single feature of the disaster movies of the 70s and later is already present here, perfectly formed. It is in effect Airport 1954.

This is one of the many interesting movies made by John Wayne’s production company Wayne-Fellows Productions, later to become Batjac Productions. Their movies were always entertaining well-made quality motion pictures and quite frankly I’ll watch any movie made by Batjac.

The High and the Mighty is an airliner disaster movie, with a screenplay by Ernest K. Gann from his own novel. Gann was a flyer who wrote aviation-themed novels and was also responsible for an earlier Batjac picture, the excellent Island in the Sky.



Dan Roman (John Wayne) is a veteran pilot who had several years earlier been the only survivor of an air crash, an accident in which his wife and child were killed. This is the reason why despite his vast experience he is now a co-pilot. The accident may not have been his fault but he has to live with it for the rest of his life and potential employers are clearly unsure if his nerve is still sufficiently intact to employ him as a pilot.

The captain of the ill-fated DC-6 about to take off from Honolulu is John Sullivan (Robert Stack), an experienced pilot but one who is troubled by vague premonitions of disaster. And disaster does in fact strike. One of the plane’s four engines catches fire. The fire is quickly extinguished but the crew are left with two major worries - the wrecked engine has been twisted slightly out of position and is now causing extra drag, and fuel is now leaking from the wing tanks. The aircraft can certainly remain airborne on three engines, but will there be enough fuel to reach San Francisco?



The advantage of such a movie set on board a piston-engined DC-6 rather than a 747 is that we get to know every passenger, since the aircraft is only carrying a couple of dozen people. There is a flight crew of four, plus one stewardess. The stories of the principal characters are recounted in flashbacks. The requirement to make everyone on board the aircraft an individual means that this is a fairly long film, with a running time of 141 minutes. While the pacing is occasionally a little slow in general the film has no problem keeping the viewer’s interest.

It also follows the formula that would later become standard, with many of the passengers played by stars who were perhaps just a little past their prime. Nonetheless Claire Trevor for one gives a sparkling performance.



The main difference between this and later aviation disaster movies is that The High and the Mighty is much more believable. It’s the kind of mishap that could and did happen, and the crew of the aircraft respond in a realistic manner. There are some great flying sequences but the emphasis is on human drama rather than stunts and special effects.

There’s an interesting parallel set up between Captain Sullivan and his co-pilot. Dan Roman has been the trauma of an air disaster, while Sullivan now faces the same prospect and his nerves are clearly somewhat shaky. Dan obviously empathises with Sullivan but if the captain cannot pull himself together the chances of survival will be slim.



John Wayne didn’t see having his own production company merely as a way of setting up star vehicles for himself. In fact he often did not appear in these films at all. In this case he makes no attempt to dominate the film - he’s content to be part of an ensemble cast and to let his fellow cast members have their chances to shine. His own performance is extremely good but it’s nicely underplayed. Robert Stack isn’t everyone’s favourite actor but he’s effective here. The supporting cast is uniformly good.

Director William A. Wellman just loved making aviation movies and he’s in his element. This is not only the first movie in its genre, it’s one of the very best, tense and highly entertaining.



This is a movie that took a long time to reach DVD due to legal wrangles but it was worth the wait and the transfer is superb, preserving the Cinemascope framing and generally looking quite wonderful.