The Oscar people should give a special award once in a while to someone who delivers a terrific performance in a terrible film. Like Doe Avedon in "The High And The Mighty."
In an opening sequence that may have inspired the intro to every "Love Boat" episode, Avedon as stewardess Miss Spaulding exchanges corny exposition with a wisecracking clerk as she greets passengers. When it's a producer played by Robert Newton, she compares him to "a tired walrus on a rock." When an ingratiating immigrant maiden (Joy Chen) shows up, Spaulding muses: "A moon and a willow tree."
All of this Avedon delivers with such finesse you almost think it could be the way humans really talk, somewhere, at some time. Amazingly, she keeps this up for the entire film. Most of her co-stars are less successful at this illusion, until it seems their stricken airliner is held aloft by windy exposition and hot air.
A dopey script by Ernest K. Gann reveals that while the writer may have known flying and the men who flew, he really didn't have the same handle on average, everyday people. No one is average aboard this flight. Each carries enormous personal luggage, revealed by director William Wellman through long flashbacks and breathless soliloquies.
"You hate me!" whines the glowering paranoiac (Sidney Blackmer) who brings a gun on board. "All of you hate me, and only because I tried to do what was right!"
"How can I ever be afraid when you hold me like this?" moans newlywed Nell (Karen Sharpe) to her man.
"Thanks for knocking some sense into my head," says pilot Sully (Robert Stack) after getting slapped by his co-pilot.
The co-pilot is played by the film's co-producer, John Wayne, in what is only a nominal leading role, Dan Roman. Often Wayne takes a backseat here, sometimes even literally, though his spotlight moments stand out for his relaxed, sympathetic cool. But even the Duke can't save this sick albatross.
The big problem here is time. "The High And The Mighty" eats up too much of it before getting to the crisis more than an hour in, with long spotlight sections on most of the 22 people on board. Then, after engine #1 blows, there's exposition bits on the rest of the cast in between the stuff about trying to reach San Francisco without getting a mouthful of the Pacific. It's two-and-a-half hours that never feels like a second less, especially when Phil Harris and Ann Doran, "the Waikiki Kids," tell us of their awful vacation in a painfully overstretched comic flashback.
In a DVD introduction, critic Leonard Maltin tells us this is "very much a film of its time" and that we need to "step back in time, and meet the movie on its own terms." He wouldn't have had to say that about "Casablanca," or even Wellman's earlier "Public Enemy" and "Wings." The latter film is silent, too. "High And The Mighty isn't a silent. You just wish it were.
In an opening sequence that may have inspired the intro to every "Love Boat" episode, Avedon as stewardess Miss Spaulding exchanges corny exposition with a wisecracking clerk as she greets passengers. When it's a producer played by Robert Newton, she compares him to "a tired walrus on a rock." When an ingratiating immigrant maiden (Joy Chen) shows up, Spaulding muses: "A moon and a willow tree."
All of this Avedon delivers with such finesse you almost think it could be the way humans really talk, somewhere, at some time. Amazingly, she keeps this up for the entire film. Most of her co-stars are less successful at this illusion, until it seems their stricken airliner is held aloft by windy exposition and hot air.
A dopey script by Ernest K. Gann reveals that while the writer may have known flying and the men who flew, he really didn't have the same handle on average, everyday people. No one is average aboard this flight. Each carries enormous personal luggage, revealed by director William Wellman through long flashbacks and breathless soliloquies.
"You hate me!" whines the glowering paranoiac (Sidney Blackmer) who brings a gun on board. "All of you hate me, and only because I tried to do what was right!"
"How can I ever be afraid when you hold me like this?" moans newlywed Nell (Karen Sharpe) to her man.
"Thanks for knocking some sense into my head," says pilot Sully (Robert Stack) after getting slapped by his co-pilot.
The co-pilot is played by the film's co-producer, John Wayne, in what is only a nominal leading role, Dan Roman. Often Wayne takes a backseat here, sometimes even literally, though his spotlight moments stand out for his relaxed, sympathetic cool. But even the Duke can't save this sick albatross.
The big problem here is time. "The High And The Mighty" eats up too much of it before getting to the crisis more than an hour in, with long spotlight sections on most of the 22 people on board. Then, after engine #1 blows, there's exposition bits on the rest of the cast in between the stuff about trying to reach San Francisco without getting a mouthful of the Pacific. It's two-and-a-half hours that never feels like a second less, especially when Phil Harris and Ann Doran, "the Waikiki Kids," tell us of their awful vacation in a painfully overstretched comic flashback.
In a DVD introduction, critic Leonard Maltin tells us this is "very much a film of its time" and that we need to "step back in time, and meet the movie on its own terms." He wouldn't have had to say that about "Casablanca," or even Wellman's earlier "Public Enemy" and "Wings." The latter film is silent, too. "High And The Mighty isn't a silent. You just wish it were.