Trouble in the Sky

I haven't seen this film for years, which is a pity because all i remember are a few powerful scenes thanks to the very impressive cast. Based on true events, but subtly changed to avoid law-suits, its actually a compelling little drama, a shame it hasn't been shown more often. The story on which it is based, the KNOWN Design Flaws in the Comet which were Covered up by the De Havilland company, and the subsequent "sacrifice" of an entire airline and its passengers in Italy, is actually screaming out to be remade! In this case, the truth is far worse than fiction...in the film, decent noble people save the day, in the reality alas...less noble and darker motives won...and people died needlessly. The performances in this little melodrama were so good, i actually remembered this film for at least 25 years...thats when i last saw it i think..well worth catching.

This film had good actors and good direction, and it was worth the few dollars that I spent on the DVD. However I was disappointed by the weak McGuffin.

That is the term invented by Alfred Hitchcock for the key ingredient in the plot that everyone is chasing -- the jewels, the microfilm, the beautiful princess or whatever. In this case the McGuffin was the rather obvious fact that under hot and humid conditions the air is less dense and therefore a higher speed is needed to take off a plane. It seems incredible that all those talented designers and skilled pilots seem to have missed the McGuffin until the final scene.

1960's "Trouble in the Sky" (British title "Cone of Silence") is an excellent airplane drama featuring as fine a cast as could be found in British films that year. At the center of it all is future 'M' in the James Bond series, Bernard Lee as Captain George Gort, who is found guilty of pilot error after a recent crash of the new Phoenix resulted in the death of his co-pilot. Captain Edward Manningham (Andre Morell) leaves Gort's fate in the judgment of examiner Hugh Dallas (Michael Craig), whose subsequent test is passed with flying colors, enabling Gort to continue his career, having logged more miles in the air than all the other pilots combined. One such pilot is Captain Clive Judd (Peter Cushing), who believes in Gort's guilt, conspiring to undermine him and have him reassigned to a ground position. Gort's rock solid convictions are so trustworthy that we too believe him to be innocent of any negligence, so it's quite a shock when similar circumstances result in an identical crash, this time killing the dedicated pilot. By now, Dallas too is convinced that the fault lies elsewhere, with the comeuppance of the arrogant Judd a key factor in finding the truth. Based on the actual 1953 case of the DeHavilland Comet, Britain's first passenger jet airliner, the remainder of the cast comes off like a Who's Who of vintage 60s cinema: Gordon Jackson, Charles Tingwell, Noel Willman, Marne Maitland, Jack Hedley, Charles Lloyd Pack, Anthony Newlands, Gerald Sim, and Geoffrey Bayldon. Of special mention is the supporting presence of George Sanders, coming off the heroic "Village of the Damned" and the villainous "Bluebeards Ten Honeymoons," here in more typical form as smarmy attorney Sir Arnold Hobbes, his damning courtroom highjinks convicting the innocent Gort. As for second-billed Peter Cushing, he makes just one appearance before the film's second half, beginning a string of nine consecutive non genre features in a failed effort to avoid the horror typecasting that Christopher Lee also feared.

This is quite a good movie with a cast of familiar faces (Peter Cushing, George Sanders, Gordon Jackson). The screenplay is based on David Beaty's novel which was inspired by actual events. In October 1952 one of BOAC's new Comet jetliners crashed at Rome Airport. The accident was due to a design error that allowed the pilot to raise the nose too high on take off and stall the airplane on the ground. The pilot was blamed for the crash and relegated to flying piston engined freighters. The following year another Comet, on a delivery flight to Canadian Pacific Airlines crashed on taking off from Karachi, Pakistan in identical circumstances. Following this accident, design modifications were made to the Comet to prevent further similar incidents.

The movie follows this scenario quite closely, except that Captain Gort, the pilot blamed for the crash (played by Bernard Lee), continues to fly the fictional "Phoenix" jets and subsequently dies in an identical accident. It is left to the Airline's initially sceptical training Captain (Michael Craig) and Captain Gort's daughter (Elizabeth Seal) to clear her father's name and get the airplane modified in the nick of time to prevent a third crash.

Although made on a smallish budget and with some model shots that look a little shaky today, this is a cut above the typical Hollywood airborne disaster epic. Little seen today, especially in it's original 'scope ratio, this deserves more recognition.

Airline pilot Bernard Lee is downgraded for 'pilot error', and eventually reinstated at full rating. His daughter, Elizabeth Seal, knows him for a by-the-book sort of man and puts a bug in the ear of pilot tester Michael Craig. He begins to suspect that the problem lies not in the pilot, but in the new jet plane; the company that manufactures it prefers to blame the man, rather than lose out in a hotly contested, lucrative market.

The movie is suggested by some issues in the De Havilland comet, the first commercial jet liner, in the early 1950s. Jet aviation was a hot topic for the movies, and NO HIGHWAYS IN THE SKY was on the film makers' minds as a likely model. All of the pilots start out being by-the-book, but their individual characters, both as men and pilots, come gradually to the fore, with Gordon Jackson (whose character is called, ineviltably, 'Jock') speaking offhandedly of instinct. In the meantime, we are confronted by everyone except Craif and Miss Seal, being walking avatars of professional probity, from George Sanders, who asks the correct questions at hearings, to Peter Cushing , who demands a retest of Lee .... and who is shocked to learn that he may have been guilty of a near-accident .... missed, like many, it is suggested, by sheer luck.

It's interesting to see in the cast so many actors who spent their careers playing villains. Instead they are tightly repressed. It's an interesting, coolly intellectualized movie that pits man and experience against the sleek, mechanized world we were moving into in the 1950s. The only strike against it is its lack of overt excitement around a now outmoded tecnology. Perhaps the modern audience would find it as relevant as a movie about steam automobiles that keep exploding. On the other hand, recent news about the Boeing 737 may make it telling.