The Flight of the Phoenix

Absorbing character piece that's acted accordingly.

A transport aeroplane carrying an assortment of men crash lands in the Sahara desert, these men must group together in spite of their varying indifference's and build another plane out of the wreckage.

It perhaps, on the surface, doesn't sound much does it? We as viewers are asked to spend over two hours watching these men interact with each other with differing results. The location stays the same, it is just sand, sun, and men awaiting death. Yet the film is one of the best exponents of the character piece because the characters each have their own personal hang ups. Be it carrying scars from the war, or a class difference of upbringing, or that demon addiction to alcohol, these me...

A true classic. 14 men on a small low budget plane working for an oil company that cares as much about their employees as one might expect. So, the plane goes down in the middle of the desert, and the twelve survivors just wait to die. James Stewart is the pilot who feels responsible, but so does his navigator played by Richard Attenborough. Meanwhile, we wonder about the other characters. We expect Ernest Borgnine, Dan Duryea, and George Kennedy to be the key players, but they relax into the backdrop, except for Borgnine, who soon fades into the backdrop. Instead, it's Ronald Frasier as a career soldier, and Hardy Kruger as an engineer, who become the key players. The engineer claims he can build an aeroplane. Little by little, Tow...

Jimmy Stewart is "Towns" who flies his dilapidated aircraft around the North African oilfields. When once such trip ends in a crash, they find themselves stuck in the desert short of water, and of ideas as to how to get themselves home. Until that is, the rather superior "Dorfmann" (Hardy Krüger) concocts a plan to perform industrial surgery on the wreckage and maybe get them airborne again. What now ensues is a tautly directed series of escapades as the personalities of crew and passengers clash; the desert takes it's toll on the sanity of some, the Bedouin on the lives of others - but can they get out? Richard Attenborough is superb, as is the usually reliable Peter Finch and his sergeant Ronald Fraser - but it is the psychological duel b...