Broken Journey

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.

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 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..........................................

Broken Journey (1948)

** (out of 4)

Forgettable "disaster" film has a plane crashing in the Alps and the variety of people on board must try to figure out a way to rescue themselves as well as not fight each other. The entire disaster genre has always been popular whether it was in the silent era, those films of the 30s like SAN FRANSISCO or IN OLD CHICAGO and going all the way up to the craze in the 1970s. With that said, most of these films are still well remembered by film buffs but I guess it's easy to see why BROKEN JOURNEY has pretty much been forgotten. This really does seem like a drawn out, boring version of FIVE CAME BACK and this here doesn't feature a single character to care for. I thought the entire group of survivors were either annoying, boring or they just weren't anyone to root or care for. This is certainly a death nail in a disaster picture like this because the fun thing is seeing the wide range of people trying to cope with the situation and each other but there's just no one here to care about. Another problem is that the entire situation is just way too pretty. I mean, just take a look at the crash sequence, which seems like a simple landing on the side of a mountain because of how easy and pretty it all looked. The situation that the people are in is never dramatic because no matter what happens something good will take place so you never once feel as if these people are in danger. The performances range from good to decent and the cinematography is without question the best thing going for the film. The non-stop dialogue has the characters saying one boring thing after another and in the end there's just no reason to watch this.

Enjoyable retread of an archetypal situation generally traced back to 'Five Came Back' in 1939 and best known these days for 'The Flight of the Phoenix'. The British stiff upper lip isn't much in evidence as this lot squabble amongst each other on top of a mountain on which they've crashed in the Alps, which makes an interesting change. (Top-billed Phyllis Calvert also wears her hair far longer and looser in the early scenes than one is used to seeing air hostesses in the movies.)