THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, one of no-nonsense director Robert Aldrich’s best movies, was also an unexpected disappointment at the box office in 1965, coming in just 40th place, the gross of $7,300,000 not enough to salvage the $5,355,000 production tab. It did notch a pair of Academy Award nominations, for Supporting Actor and Film Editing. Critics were out to lunch (with each other) and for some reason audiences didn’t turn up for a number of the year’s fine adventure movies: even more ignored than this ace entry were Mister Moses, A High Wind In Jamaica, The Naked Prey and Sands Of The Kalahari. *

“If you hadn’t made a career out of being a drunk you might not have been a second-rate navigator in a firth-rate outfit. And if you’d not stayed in your bunk to kill that last bottle, maybe you might have checked that engineer’s report on the radio and we might not be here now. All right!”

Libya. A cargo plane, crew of two, twelve passengers, flying from remote oasis Jaghbub to Benghazi, hits a sandstorm. Off course, engines knocked out, radio blinked, veteran pilot ‘Frank Towns’ (James Stewart) manages to crash land in the vastness of the Saharan dunes, two men perishing in the wreck. So now Towns, his friend and shaky navigator ‘Lew Moran’ (Richard Attenborough) and the other eight have to figure out how to survive. Ration water, as long as it will last. Stay put? March out? Or…is there a daft hope of somehow reconstructing a new plane from what’s left of the old one? Situation, logistics, and personalities play into the chances of staying alive.

Keen on stories that pit complex characters against vexing dilemmas, and not one to gild his tale telling with false sentiment or easy outs, Aldrich came off successful actress-centric melodramas Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte to wrestle in the sand with a men-against-the-elements epic. Just one female cast member is present: Barrie Chase as a belly dancer, viewed for a little over one minute, imagined in a hallucination by one of the men. Lukas Heller’s superb screenplay was adapted from Elleston Trevor’s 242 page novel, with the director and his cast fine-tuning Heller’s work to best fit their skill sets vis-à-vis the disparate and desperate men they were picked to portray. Aided by literally blistering work from the makeup team, the harrowing saga had Joseph Biroc as cinematographer, shooting mostly in southern California’s handy Algodones Dunes, an erg 45 miles long and six wide next to the Arizona/Mexico borders. **

“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?”

Marvelous casting. For Stewart, 57, this joined with the year’s more popular Shenandoah as his top line work in the latter end of his career, conviction assured by his own experience as a pilot. Attenborough, 42, was on a roll of vivid performances (The Great Escape, Seance On A Wet Afternoon, Guns At Batasi, The Sand Pebbles); he has a breakdown scene of emotionally exhausted hilarity that’s priceless. Matching him is the focused intensity of Hardy Kruger as smugly acidic ‘Heinrich Dorfmann’, who may hold the key to salvation—if he doesn’t irritate everyone enough to bash him senseless. Peter Finch excels as the quietly reassuring Brit officer ‘Capt. Harris’, saddled with lout sergeant ‘Watson’ (Ronald Fraser), who’s almost as much trouble as eruptive mental case ‘Trucker Cobb’ (Ernest Borgnine). Sarcasm vents from cheerfully nasty ‘Crow’ (Ian Bannen, 37, nicking the Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor) and their are stalwart turns from Christian Marquand, Dan Duryea and George Kennedy, each of them likable and sympathetic to balance out the hard cases.

“The little men with the slide rules and computers are going to inherit the earth“.

The editing nod went to Michael Luciano (twenty Aldrich outings). Taking the Academy to task we’d add two more in the supporting category—Attenborough and Kruger, one for Aldrich as director (the Hollywood elite never favored him other than as a moneymaker), and another for the screenplay. It’s certainly a more compelling and rewarding watch than two of the Best Picture nominees (bitterness pill Darling and insistently annoying A Thousand Clowns).

Frank de Vol gets it off and running with an exciting and exotica-evoking score; he was another go-to talent for the director, collaborating on sixteen pictures, including The Dirty Dozen. Since all big movies of the era felt compelled to have the soundtrack include a song tie-in, this one features a slice of “Senza Fine”, adapted from De Vol’s theme tune, and heard briefly on the radio, performed by Connie Francis. It didn’t chart as a hit, but Connie went on to make it part of her repertoire.

Notably and on a tragic note, famed movie stunt pilot Paul Mantz was killed during the shoot when doing practice runs with the ‘Tallmantz Phoenix P-1’, the aircraft designed for the story’s cobbled-together escape hope. The picture concludes with the honorific “It should be remembered… that Paul Mantz, a fine man and a brilliant flyer gave his life in the making of this film…”

142 enthralling minutes, with Alex Montoya, Gabriele Tinti, Peter Bravos and William Aldrich. Those two last gents are the casualties during the opening smashup. That was director Aldrich showing a mordant sense of humor, as William was his son, Peter his son-in-law: he bumped off his own relatives!  On the subject of infanticide, then: since Show ‘Business’ never lets Art rest in peace this classic was needlessly and disastrously remade in 2004. Do not book that flight.

* Adventure Movies aren’t defined as genre, since they cross-breed with science-fiction, war flix and assorted semi-historical or mythological romps. And ‘serious’ critics rarely accord them serious consideration. In the 60s the 007 phenomenon roared into contention but they tend to be dubbed ‘thrillers’. Notable adventures (both good and bad) in the decade—Swiss Family Robinson, The Devil At 4 O’Clock, In Search Of The Castaways, Five Weeks In A Balloon, Mutiny On The Bounty, Hatari!, Kings Of The Sun, That Man From Rio, Sammy Going South, The Long Ships, Lord Jim, The Truth About Spring, She, The Sand Pebbles, Dark Of The Sun, Ice Station Zebra, Krakatoa, East Of Java, The Red Tent.

** Have we walked in circles or is it a mirage that those Algodones Dunes look familiar? Sink into their foreboding beauty via The Lost Patrol, The Garden Of Allah, Road To Morocco, Tobruk, Return Of The Jedi , Spaceballs, Stargate, The Scorpion King, Jarhead…