John Wayne's The High and the Mighty.
 

Saw this 1954 movie for the first time yesterday. It is on DVD and had not seen the light of day very often.

Slow movie with a lot of characters with extensive back stories. I could not stop thinking of the Airplane movies while watching this as so much of the parodies seemed to be aimed squarely at this one blockbuster which started the transportation disaster genre.

If you enjoy movies with a lot story development revisit The High and the Mighty.

I guess you are like me. Dig into the archives and rent a movie from the past. I enjoy doing that. Just to see the old actors and actresses perform. Many of them are a cut above what we are stuck with today.

I remember seeing that movie when it first came out. Notice back then people got dressed up to fly, coat and tie. I especially enjoyed the theme song. My wife and I enjoy getting from netflix old movies.

The High and the Mighty
 

One of my favorite all time movies.....Duke, Bob Stack, Ricky's mom, Phil, and beautiful Jan Sterling........a real airplane with propellers (DC-6b) Wish they could make more like this.....

Wish I could whistle Fumar

Flew on the real airplane (DC-6B) from Travis AFB, CA to Saigon, RVN in 1966.

39 hours in the air. Travis to Honolulu to Wake Island (still had a wrecked zero on the beach near the Japanese bunkers) to Clark AFB in Manila to Ton Son Nhut in Saigon. All on three engines - we would take off with 4 and about 2 hours into the flight 1 would die. Each stop they got all four running again but not for long. Saturn Airways contract carrier.

On the return a year later was on a 707 that made the flight in 17 hours in the air with one stop in Japan.

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The airplane used in most of the scenes of The High and the Mighty-- except the scenes at the end on the runway-- later disappeared. From Wikipedia's article on The High and the Mighty

"...ironically a decade after its appearance in the motion picture this same aircraft suffered a similar engine fire during an overnight trans-Pacific flight and was lost with no survivors. At 8:47 PM (HST) on March 27, 1964, N4726V took off on a charter flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles with a crew of three and six passengers on board. A few minutes before 6 AM (PST), eight hours into the anticipated 11 hour, 40 minute flight, a Mayday call from the pilot was heard reporting the flight's position as about 700 miles west of San Francisco with a serious fire in engine #2 (left inboard), and saying that "...we may have to put it in" (aviation jargon for ditching in the ocean). No further transmissions were heard."