Soooo many people seem to have such a fond, albeit clouded, memory of this trashy, badly acted and worse directed early attempt at the Hollywood "disaster" genre. I too saw this as a youngster at a time when CinemaScope and really good magnetic stereophonic sound was all the rage (to give you an idea, the word CinemaScope is placed BEFORE the main title and in a bigger point size!) and for years I enjoyed this skewed memory of it, always thinking that it was a great film. Over the years we were able to hear the very popular Dimitri Tiomkin theme song in a variety of instrumental and vocal arrangements play on the radio and records and cassettes continuously over the years. This kept a memory of the film in our collective consciousness, but without ACTUALLY having access to the film itself as it never played again in theatres. Decades later when the age of video was upon us, that title was not available for decades. I posit that this attributed to keeping a very romanticized memory of it alive in our collective psyche. Alas, not having it available for decades seems to have seriously distorted and fogged that memory as we recall it thru the distance of time and rose-colored classes. Now that it IS available again and we can actually watch it from start to finish with a critical eye not distorted by questionable memory of our youth or the John Wayne mystique, upon watching it again, I was really shocked; it was quite obvious to me that my memory was way, WAY off! By any standard, this is one sappy, overblown, wholly unbelievable piece of trash -- badly acted, terribly directed and edited and with dialog that at times is downright laughable. Except for a great music score which only attests to how talented Tiomkin is and that he was able to save an otherwise awful, incoherent story-line, a painfully overacted script, characters who not only were uninteresting, but who, by midway through this overly long drudge of a movie, had become so annoying that I was secretly wishing the plane would indeed plunge into "the brink," as they called the Pacific Ocean, and drown the whole lot of them. About the only saving grace for me was I could see all the great iconic bits which, decades later, were so brilliantly incorporated into AIRPLANE! -- I didn't realize so many actually came from this clunker with Robert Stack hilariously caricaturing his incredibly stiff performance, which only pointed to the genius of the AIRPLANE! writers and to the utter silliness of this dog. Here we have a text-book example a vanity project (producer and actor rolled into one) and what happens when a good cast is put the hands of an what can only be described as untalented director who doesn't know when to yell cut, letting shots run on much longer than they should and who cannot rein in his cast so they don't make fools of themselves, all over-acting to the point where the thing starts to look like a third- rate, really bad soap-opera or a silent film melodrama. It's a shame Warners let this one out of "the vault;" it would have been much smarter for the Wayne estate to just keep it off the market indefinitely -- that would have allowed it to retained that mystique that we all shared about it, i.e., that it actually was a really decent, even great movie from our youth that we wish we could see again. Now that we can see it, I must say that sadly, the bloom has gone way, WAY off that rose. Seriously. My recommendation -- if you think you remember this as one of the great films you saw when you were a kid, watching it will only waste 2 hours and 24 minutes of your life (it feels much MUCH longer) and serve only to teach you the hard lesson that the memories of our youth are not always what they seem. For anyone under, say, 40, or who's never seen it before, it won't even be comprehensible why anyone would think the awful acting style and amateur direction could have ever been thought of as some great film work of a past generation. They might even mistake it as just an early attempt at an AIRPLANE! wannabe comedy. And of course they would be wrong. Keep it in the vault.

The High and the Mighty (1954)This overblown title is misleading for a movie that is a mainstream and uninspired airplane in trouble film. It's not terrible, but there aren't even pretensions here of greatness beyond the title. John Wayne? He's fun to see without a cowboy hat, and he's got great presence, but don't expect much from him, either.This is a classic "ship of fools" story that has an early Hollywood example in the 1939 "Stagecoach" which featured Wayne and another co-star here, Claire Trevor. In that fashion, which involves each character being defined and contrasted to the others in a moment of crisis, the story is one about psychology more than survival. Who will be strong, who will be the threat, and what skeletons will come from which closets?Or that's the general idea of these kinds of plots. Here, nothing much will turn up on any of these fronts. In the sad decline of Hollywood through the 1950s, as writers left for t.v. and money grew thin, stories like these, and filming decisions like shooting a whole movie inside a plane (cheap and effective) throw some limitations in our face. Director William Wellman is one of the stalwarts of Old Hollywood, and he's done a competent job here—the pacing and the overall feel of things is reasonable if not special. The producers include Wayne himself, and it's got to be tricky when the money for the director and crew is coming from the leading actor. Both cast and crew were miserable about shooting conditions (cold outside, cramped inside). And the cinematographer struggled to make the widescreen shooting work in the tight space.So why watch this? Why indeed! The movie has some fans, but even praise is usually mixed with misgivings. The movie did undergo an expensive restoration (Wayne as producer/owner of the film had kept the original himself and it was damaged in storage). The score by Tiomkin is overbearing but it won an Oscar all the same. You can look for Robert Stack as pilot, and recall that he revisited that role in the spoof "Airplane!"You might even remember the source and inspiration for "Airplane!" as the forgotten 1957 "Zero Hour!" (note they even kept the exclamation point) which is also a flawed but certainly more exciting film than "The High and the Mighty." If you do watch this one, you might like it, but it's no classic.

The High and the Mighty is the rare film that has been rendered almost impossible to watch because of the later films that it has inspired. It tells the story, way back in 1954, of a propeller airliner that loses an engine and is in danger of ditching midway through a flight from Honolulu to San Francisco (sound familiar?). The characters on the plane are revealed through dialogue and have self-revelations as a result of their terrifying experience. The pilots grimly try to nurse the plane to safety.How can anyone really watch this movie? When the 2nd officer says to John Wayne, "remember that day over South America (when you crashed)," I could only think of Robert Hays and "Macho Grande" from our favorite comedy. Then, of course, Robert Stack gives us his best earnest looks and determined dialogue, and I was expecting someone to say "Don't call me Shirley." Of course, the other "serious" Airport movies that this creature inspired were some of the most insipid cinematic trash in movie history (albeit entertaining trash), so you really wonder if director William Wellmann was thrilled at giving rise to a whole genre that could be considered a blight on the face of film making.Still, we have to make some sort of effort to like this movie on its own merits. I will say one thing--it is the only "Airport" movie that actually makes a serious attempt at characterization--this was, after all, made before directors realized that you did not need real characters in order to sell tickets to a disaster flick (Rosie Grier, anyone?). And yet, some of the script is so dated that you wonder if people really talked like that back in 1954. I doubt it. And then, there is Dmitri Tiomkin's musical score. Unlike the later Airport movies, which featured lousy music by Hollywood hacks, Tiomkin's score is an amazing symphony in the style of Wagner or Rachmaninoff that, even to a trained ear, is an absolute delight to listen to. Problem is that the score is sitting behind a plane crash drama and bunch of panicky people, and simply seems way out of place. I found myself listening to the music blissfully and wishing everyone would just shut up.Oddly enough, as weird as this experience was to watch this movie in 2015, I cannot fully conclude it was a bad movie. The story lines were vaguely interesting, John Wayne gives his usual sympathetic performance, and some scenes were genuinely heartfelt and/or evocative. I enjoyed it. But never has a movie been more completely obliterated by its spin-offs and rip-offs, especially given the fact that it was only decent at best to start with.

THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954) is surprisingly not a John Wayne vehicle. It is instead an ensemble piece focusing on the passengers, as well as the crew, onboard an airplane during an in-flight emergency. Every passenger has a story, and we learn all of them through flashbacks, internal monologues, and expository dialogue.The cast features Robert Stack as the pilot and John Wayne as his veteran co-pilot, with Claire Trevor, Robert Newton, Laraine Day, Phil Harris, Paul Kelly, Jan Sterling, John Qualen, and David Brian among the passengers. Doe Avedon earns special mention as the wonderful stewardess.Seen through modern eyes, the melodrama is a little hokey (especially the bit about the kid who can sleep through anything). Anyone who's seen AIRPLANE! (1980) can see how this movie is ripe for parody. But this 2 1/2-hour saga is still an enjoyable ride, paving the way for star-studded disaster spectacles like THE LAST VOYAGE (1960), AIRPORT (1970), THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), and THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974).