"The Flight of the Phoenix": Criterion BD Edition
A testament to American grit and German engineering, though not nearly as smooth going as that might suggest. The American in question, a grizzled pilot named Frank Towns (Jimmy Stewart), is forced to work with Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), a German aviation engineer, after their cargo plane carrying 13 other passengers crashes in the Sahara during a sandstorm.
After a few days of hoping for a rescue, Dorfmann convinces Towns, and his navigator, Lew Moran (Sir Richard Attenborough), to get everyone else to help him construct a new plane from the remnants of the old one. After much teeth-gnashing and snarling back and forth, Towns and Dorfmann work together, but only in fits and starts. As the water supply continues to dwindle, their only hope for survival is with the two of them burying their differences long enough to make it out alive.
The cast is peppered with strong character actors -- including Ian Bannen, as a roguish Scotsman, who makes fun of everyone; Peter Finch as a proper British Army captain, and Ronald Fraser as his cowardly sergeant; and Ernest Borgnine as a chief oil rigger who has lost his marbles; among others -- who do their thing amid the enduring tensions between the principles.
For their part, Stewart, his character wracked with guilt about the men who already died on his watch, and Kruger, playing a relentlessly hard-driving and arrogant wisenheimer, present an estimable conflict, born of their raging egos. It is only when Frank, having driven Heinrich into retreat with his stubbornness, realizes the necessity of subverting his own need to be in charge in order to have a chance at survival, that things really pull together -- a strangely progressive message for a film released in 1965 (for that matter, having the sergeant, who fakes an injury, and then flat-out refuses a direct order from his captain, survive also seems a curiously anti-Hollywood sort of choice).
Robert Aldrich's film was primarily shot in Yuma, Ariz., which provides plenty of heat and sand dunes, if not quite to the extent of Africa's version. The director seems to relish in the suffering of the crew, growing dingier, bearded, and more parched by the scene. By the end, the survivors look suitably ragged and ruined, the skin on their faces having peeled off, and their sores baked into darkened, calcified splotches. At 142 minutes, it runs a mite long, though the engineering and construction aspects create an engaging procedural flow, even if some of the interpersonal conflicts feel a bit shoehorned.
Extras: Included in this smart Blu-Ray Special Edition, which offers a 2K digital restoration print, a conversation between Walter Hill and film historian Alain Silver; and an interview with Stewart biographer Donald Dewey, about the esteemed actor's actual flying experience in the Air Force as a bomber pilot.