ZERO HOUR! (1957)

I've been wanting to see this movie for years: it's the film that the classic 1980 comedy AIRPLANE! is based on. I love AIRPLANE (and I will assume that my readers have seen it as well) and watch it at least once a year, so there was not a chance that I could have watched this film with an objective eye. And the fact that AIRPLANE is, essentially, a scene-for-scene remake of this movie, albeit with a satiric and often scatological tone, makes it difficult to take this original film seriously. We begin in World War II when pilot Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews) takes his men on a bombing mission through thick fog. Several of the men die and the badly injured Stryker blames himself. His guilt incapacitates him and wrecks havoc with his career (he is afraid of flying) and his personal life. Years later, Stryker is offered a job by an old pal, but when he comes home to celebrate the news, he finds that his wife Ellen (Linda Darnell) has taken their young son Joey and left him. Stryker goes after his wife and manages to get on the same plane she's on, heading to Vancouver, trying to talk her into having faith in him this time. After the in-flight meal is served, everyone who ate the fish gets virulent food poisoning, including the pilot and co-pilot. The plane is put on autopilot and there is a frantic search for someone on board who can finish the flight and land the plane. Reluctantly, Stryker agrees to try, helped out by his wife as co-pilot and a captain (Sterling Hayden) radioing in from the ground at Vancouver, who happens to have known Stryker during the war.

Yes, most of that summary also works as a summary of AIRPLANE. Many viewers probably thought that AIRPLANE was parodying the Airport series of disaster movies from the 70s, which to some degree it was, but the fact is that AIRPLANE's makers bought the remake rights to ZERO HOUR and they followed the original quite closely. So as early as the World War II scene, when Stryker's name is intoned seriously by a narrator, I started giggling. Other things that happen in this film which are now hard to take seriously: the pilot asks the young boy, "Ever been in a cockpit before?" (see photo above); Stryker sweats; the Vancouver captain says he "picked the wrong time to quit smoking"; a hysterical woman gets slapped; a doctor's announcement that they need to find someone who can fly the plan AND didn't eat fish. Even the movie's sets look alike. I can say that Dana Andrews gives a strong performance as Stryker, and the landing scene works up tension quite effectively. Fun to watch but impossible to evaluate fairly. [TCM]