So, this can’t be a real movie review. I really haven’t seen the whole movie so it would be false advertising to claim I was a fair reviewer. But even viewing the part of the movie I watched I felt moved to talk about this “gem.”
There’s something about movies about airliners in danger that seems to liberate the cast and producers from trying to produce a good film. Whether it’s Dean Martin in “Airport” in the 1970s or Bill Shatner in “Terror at 20,000 Feet” on the Twilight Zone, these airline flights always seem to degenerate into a race to the bottom between the awful plot and the staggeringly bad dialog and wooden acting.
Well, I’m proud to add “The High and Mighty” to this Olympus of aero-schlock. And it has some amazing features. Heading up the cast is John Wayne as Dan Roman the first officer on a commercial airliner flying from Honolulu to San Francisco. The captain is John Sullivan played laconically by Robert Stack whom I only remember as Elliot Ness on tv’s “The Untouchables.” The only other familiar names in the cast are Robert Newton and Claire Trevor as random passengers and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in a very minor part as a Coast Guard junior officer. But it really doesn’t matter whether the actors are well-known or unknowns because no actual acting is committed anywhere in the movie that I witnessed.
There is plot and it involves various passengers describing their mental problems or trying to shoot each other over a supposed marital affair but the main event is one of the engines exploding and the plane losing enough fuel to make a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean the aviation peril that every good disaster movie needs. And so, for about three quarters of the movie the flight engineer, the first officer and the captain bicker about whether they should drop the plane in the ocean or try to make it to San Francisco. Eventually after the flight engineer realizes that he has been mixing up knots with miles per hour, he delivers the bad news; they will run out of fuel, eleven minutes short of the airport and Robert Stack makes the executive decision that they will ditch. But John Wayne keeps stalling him because he’s hoping that a tail wind will appear and save them the extra fuel. But a half hour before the end of the 147-minute movie Stack shouts that he’s going to ditch the plane. At which point John Wayne slaps him across the face and calls him a pansy (or something) and takes over the controls. And a few minutes later Stack thanks Wayne for straightening him out and at long last the plane lands without any loss of life or cinematic interest. When measured by the ground crew there is only thirty gallons of fuel left.
So, do I recommend this movie? Absolutely. It’s amazingly bad and without redeeming qualities. Except one. John Wayne gets to play John Wayne without any pretense to art. It’s the Duke slapping around wimps and generating jet fuel out of thin air. For any real fan of John Wayne that’s enough for an amusing visit.