The Flight of the Phoenix (1966)

An all-star cast attempts a feat just this side of implausible in The Flight of the Phoenix, a taut disaster movie set in the Saharan desert. As the pilot whose arrogance dooms a dozen men to sandy purgatory, Jimmy Stewart embodies an old-school flying philosophy that butts up against the modern design concepts of a priggish German. The fact that the disagreeable German is most often correct, and Stewart the American is pig-headed and irascible, is novelist Elleston Trevor's acknowledgment of the shifting power dynamics in the international scientific community, as well as the arrival of a new brand of post-war leader. Lukas Heller's adaptation of Trevor's novel is a real slow burn, unfolding over 148 smartly paced minutes of these men coming apart at the seams, sometimes literally -- as part of a visceral makeup scheme by Ben Nye Sr., the harsh desert exposure leaves the men pocked with open sores, their loose flaps of skin peeling off like paint from the side of a house. The movie foreshadows the wave of star-studded disaster films that would come along in the 1970s, most notably in its clever opening credits sequence. The names of the who's who cast appear -- Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine -- and the camera freeze-frames on each panicked face as the plane descends toward earth. The characters' most basic instincts are exposed under the dire conditions that follow, and these delineate into the broad character types at the core of a good disaster film. It's a tribute to Robert Aldrich's film that courage is not always rewarded -- nor cowardice punished -- according to Hollywood's usual standards of justice. Alternately theatrical and grounded, for want of a better word, The Flight of the Phoenix is tense entertainment. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide