No Highway in the Sky

Too few of Nevil Shute's great stories found their way into film, and this is one of the better ones. The book, however, is more suspenseful, as the reader wonders whether the transatlantic flight carrying the metallurgical engineer will make it across or crash. In the movie, the suspense is missing, because you know that no studio will allow Jimmy Stewart to die midway through the film. Also, in the book the engineer is a bit of a religious fanatic, and this has understandably been purged from the film. Still, it's a good yarn, well played by Stewart, Marlene, and a very fetching Glynis Johns. The special effects are what you might expect of a movie of this vintage, and a remake, in color and with computer graphics, might be worth doing. Really worth doing would be other Shute novels, like Pastoral, The Chequer Board, and, especially, Trustee from the Toolroom.