HotToastyRag The High and the Mighty was the grandpa of the plentiful disaster movies from the 1970s, so if you like that genre and haven't yet seen this original version, rent it this weekend. It has all the elements: a large, star-studded cast, backstories for each character to make you care, a reason why each character should survive even when it doesn't look like they will, and of course, a disaster. It's intense and exciting, and while I find the subject matter frightening, it's very good!John Wayne and Robert Stack-who would later spoof this role in Airplane!-are airline pilots on a flight from Hawaii to San Francisco. Keep in mind, back in the day, that route was a twelve-hour flight, not a five-hour flight like it is now. Among the passengers are Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, Robert Newton, Phil Harris, Jan Sterling, and Joy Kim. During the flight, the audience is treated to everyone's backstory as the tension builds; we finally learn there's a problem with the plane and it might not make it all the way to Frisco!As a sidenote, Dimitri Tiomkin won an Oscar for his memorable theme. If you listen to it, you might recognize it, but while it is a pretty theme, it sounds much more like a romance than a thriller. If it was the theme to Peyton Place, it would have been lovely. For a disaster movie about a plane crash? It just doesn't fit, and it almost ruins the movie.Besides the music, a couple of technical flaws, and a healthy bit of Americana racism, the rest of the movie is very good, especially when you consider it was the first of its kind. John Wayne and Robert Stack, the two with the vastly larger amounts of screen time, are very good. I've never thought John Wayne was the greatest actor in the world, but he puts his whole heart into this movie.

Hot 888 Mama . . . my rating of "8" out of 10 actually is for a supplemental piece titled ON DIRECTOR WILLIAM A. WELLMAN, which is one of the many diverse and unconnected musings thrown together into something called THE MAKING OF THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY for this film's 2005 restoration and DVD release. Wellman, of course, directed that John Wayne vehicle, as well as the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, WINGS. Wellman's biographer, Kevin Brownlow, emphasizes here that MIGHTY was NOT Wellman's preferred bag of popcorn, but that the director was a sucker for any story involving flight, since he was a decorated WWI war hero himself as a military aviator. Though it's mentioned in passing that Wellman's masterpieces were such movies as HEROES FOR SALE, this DVD extra clocks in at less than 10 minutes, so there apparently wasn't time for anyone to explain how an authentic American Hero politically to the left of Bernie Sanders could have co-existed during the shoot with Wayne, America's self-appointed "Snitch-in-Chief" at this time, who during the 1950s ruined the lives of Oscar winners such as Dalton Trumbo (please see TRUMBO) and Paul Revere's several-times great grand-daughter Anne, and fingered many Hollywood greats for Black Ops assassination by the CIA, including John Garfield and Errol Flynn.

secondtake The High and the Mighty (1954)This overblown title is misleading for a movie that is a mainstream and uninspired airplane in trouble film. It's not terrible, but there aren't even pretensions here of greatness beyond the title. John Wayne? He's fun to see without a cowboy hat, and he's got great presence, but don't expect much from him, either.This is a classic "ship of fools" story that has an early Hollywood example in the 1939 "Stagecoach" which featured Wayne and another co-star here, Claire Trevor. In that fashion, which involves each character being defined and contrasted to the others in a moment of crisis, the story is one about psychology more than survival. Who will be strong, who will be the threat, and what skeletons will come from which closets?Or that's the general idea of these kinds of plots. Here, nothing much will turn up on any of these fronts. In the sad decline of Hollywood through the 1950s, as writers left for t.v. and money grew thin, stories like these, and filming decisions like shooting a whole movie inside a plane (cheap and effective) throw some limitations in our face. Director William Wellman is one of the stalwarts of Old Hollywood, and he's done a competent job here—the pacing and the overall feel of things is reasonable if not special. The producers include Wayne himself, and it's got to be tricky when the money for the director and crew is coming from the leading actor. Both cast and crew were miserable about shooting conditions (cold outside, cramped inside). And the cinematographer struggled to make the widescreen shooting work in the tight space.So why watch this? Why indeed! The movie has some fans, but even praise is usually mixed with misgivings. The movie did undergo an expensive restoration (Wayne as producer/owner of the film had kept the original himself and it was damaged in storage). The score by Tiomkin is overbearing but it won an Oscar all the same. You can look for Robert Stack as pilot, and recall that he revisited that role in the spoof "Airplane!"You might even remember the source and inspiration for "Airplane!" as the forgotten 1957 "Zero Hour!" (note they even kept the exclamation point) which is also a flawed but certainly more exciting film than "The High and the Mighty." If you do watch this one, you might like it, but it's no classic.

marksez This has always been a great movie. Even contrasted with today's technology of great big airplanes that carry hundreds of people, this story of a little DC-7 on the brink of disaster makes for good movie stuff.The movie isn't just about the pending disaster, of course, it's about the life problems each of the characters is dealing with and how this experience of survival puts all of those problems into perspective.If you're going to watch and appreciate "Airplane" you have to watch this movie and "Airport" to get the jokes and the satire of "Airplane".The actors overplay their roles, and that's what makes this movie great 1950's movie history. I love the scene of the DC-7 taking off right into the camera. It's a cool shot.They don't make like this anymore.