Broken Journey

An airplane flying over the Alps has engine trouble and has to land on a glacier. The radio is busted, so they can't tell folks where they are. The passengers and crew try to survive with dwindling supplies and little chance of being found. A fairly typical disaster film scenario where a cast of colourful characters including an actress, a boxer, an opera singer and a man in an iron lung face a crisis. The cast of British character actors unsurprisingly do a fairly good job with the formula.

A mismatched group of people (the singer, the movie star and her boyfriend, the man in the iron lung and his nurse, a refugee, etc) are passengers on a plane which makes an emergency landing on a glacier. Miles from anywhere and with the radio out, theirs is a bitter tale of survival which does not necessarily end happily ever after.

Wonderful movie, beautifully shot and with some wonderful acting by Phyllis Calvert and Sonia Holm, as well as David Tomlinson who hits on every girl he can find! An easy 10/10.

Very enjoyable and hilarious in places, although I'm not sure if that was always intentional!

A group of folks are on a plane that crash lands high in the Swiss Alps. Their radio is flat so they have to decide whether to stick it out in the (relative) safety of their aircraft or set off to find help. It's got quite a good British cast - a starring performance from Francis L. Sullivan with Guy Rolfe & Phyllis Calvert et al but the characters are all pretty unattractive and by the end I really didn't much care if they survived or not... It is also quite dialogue heavy with precious little actual action once the plane has skidded to it's lofty stop..........................................

This film seems to be somewhat based on the John Farrow-directed film, "Five Came Back," though I suppose this 1948 film uses a fairly derivative plot and could have been based on a lot of things.

A plane crashes into the Alps, but the passengers and crew survive. However, the radio is out. On board: an opera singer, Perami (Francis L. Sullivan), a movie star (Joanna Dane), a man in an iron long (John Barber), his nurse (Sonia Holm), the pilot, James Donald (Bill Halverton), the flight attendant (Phyllis Calvert), and other assorted characters.

The film revolves around the ideas of courage, selfishness, and self-sacrifice as the passengers fight to survive as their food runs out and the cold settles into their bones, and they all start to get on one another's nerves.

The Alps scenes are spectacular, and their vastness and desolate appearance brought "Lost Horizon" to mind.

All in all, pretty good, with some decent performances. You'll see better versions of this plot, but you'll also see worse.