Thrilling airplane picture, and I can't think of many other airplane pictures to compare it to. Much better than 'The High And The Mighty"(1954), and "Five Came Back"(1939), and different than "Lost Horizon"(1937). "The Night My Number Came Up" is a compelling and suspenseful film about differing conceptions of fate as presented in a dream - the dream of someone who was not a passenger on the trip.Briefly, a man at a party recounts a dream he had about an airline crash. He is talking to a group who are flying the next day, and some of the travelers are spooked. He then departs and the group discuss his dream; some dismiss it and others show great concern. But during the trip elements of the dream begin to fall into place.The acting is first-rate throughout the cast. The main character is seldom-seen Alexander Knox as a passenger flying for the first time. Stalwart Michael Redgrave is his flying companion, and Denholm Elliot and Sheila Sim lend strong support. The picture has a claustrophobic feel as most of it takes place in the passenger cabin, perhaps increasing the feeling of impending doom. This may be in the picture's favor, as it adds to the tension and heightens the suspense, the way many movies attempt but few succeed the way this one does.

Based on a true story, this follows a group of VIPs in 1947 flying from Hong Kong to Tokyo in an RAF Dakota, which develops problems and in a snow storm at night with the radio gone has to crash land on the rugged empty north-east coast of Japan. The last dramatic minutes of the increasingly uneasy trip had been exactly foreseen in a dream that was recounted by a guest at a dinner party before they left. Tension mounts relentlessly from the moment the doomed flight begins. Anybody who has any fear of flying should on no account watch this film.Michael Redgrave as the chief protagonist, Air Marshal Hardie, dominates the film with his strong presence. Both Alexander Knox as a senior civil servant who has never flown before and Sheila Sim as a secretary, the only woman on the fated plane, are still in trauma from a Japanese internment camp. Denholm Elliott is a Battle of Britain hero whose nerve has gone and George Rose is a brash Birmingham businessman. Michael Hordern, not on the flight, is the naval officer who had the alarming dream. Nigel Stock, pilot of the Dakota, has some issues to contend with and there are cameos for Bill Kerr and Alfie Bass as a pair of comic squaddies.Decent script by R C Sheriff, of "Journey's End" and "Goodbye, Mr Chips" fame, which catches well the clichés, hesitations and understatements in which the English conversed at the time. Among these are the ambiguities surrounding the relationship with Asian people and the degree to which British civil servants and businessmen ever understood them. Not intended, maybe, but there is also a strong air of End of Empire. Though the British had regained their eastern footholds in 1945, their day was over and the locals knew it. No more would the British be the master race, commercially or militarily, for despite brave talk they now depended on American might. The conference to which the party in the plane is going was presumably chaired by Americans, who were attempting to redraw the map of Asia in their style. The starting point and symbol of this new era was the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened by American nuclear bombs. Ironically, the prime reason for the eventual crash of the Dakota is that the Air Marshal, for professional and historical reasons, uses up precious fuel by diverting to overfly the devastation. Even more ironically, both cities are hidden by cloud, so the fuel is completely wasted.

Nicely done tale of an RAF officer, Redgrave, who hears of a dream that the airplane on which he and some others are flying will crash in snow and darkness -- then watches as the mosaic falls into place.The airplane on which there are eight passengers and five crewmen -- with characteristics specified in the dream -- is a two-engine Douglas Dakota, also known as a DC3 or R4D or C47. They're marvelously "forgiving" airplanes, as pilots say, meaning that you can make all kinds of mistakes without their falling out of the sky. They're not big, they're not fast, but they're functional and versatile. I flew in one from Edwards Air Force Base to Rome, New York, sharing an oxygen mask with a more than ordinarily attractive Navy nurse who was my seat mate. An entirely pleasant trip.These guys aren't so lucky. The dream is spelled out to the Air Marshall (Redgrave) but except for a few details, it's murky, like most dreams. When the airplane leaves Hong Kong for Tokyo, with a layover in Okinawa, some of the circumstances don't fit. There's a pretty woman, for instance, as in the dream, and at the last minute the number of passengers climbs to eight, but there's no brash, vulgar man who will blow his cork at the last moment.Gradually, the circumstances change until they are identical to those of the dream, as if a crossword puzzle had been filled in. The tension builds neatly as the Dakota flies through thunderstorms, its radio fails, ice builds up on the leading edges of the wings, fuel runs low, darkness closes in, snow begins to fall, the steward tries to calm everyone, and Alexander Knox, who has never flown before, grits his teeth and squirms with anxiety. I know how he feels, having spent five minutes in a silent airplane before its coincidental meeting with the Atlantic Ocean. Take the train.There is a good deal of chat about the dream and whether or not it has any relation to actual future events. Knox is convinced it does. Redgrave and his aid (Eliot), are uncertain but believe it's best not to think about it. These conversations slow the movie down. We know more about dreams now than we did in 1955. They don't mean anything except that some of the more primitive structures of the mid brain are trying to figure out what memories to store and they're working at it like nobody's business. Psychologists find that the vast majority of dreams -- more than 70 percent, if I remember -- are pretty lousy. If I get chased through that bog by a man-eating ogre one more time, I don't know what I'll do. The remaining 20 or 30 percent of dreams are kind of fun, especially the sex ones, except when they drag in that mechanical horse.Best performance in the most complex role: Michael Redgrave. And Denhold Elliott as the RAF officer ready to pop is pretty good too. His wild eyes seem to glisten with fear and a hint of insanity. Knox is confined to a gloomy role and doesn't do much with it. Redgrave had an even better part in an enthralling dream movie, "Dead of Night."

Leslie Halliwell in his book HALLIWELL'S HARVEST refers to this as a "smoking room story", which is the kind of reminiscence tale told between old friends in a club over drinks. It is not given in one shot - all good anecdotes are told slowly and build up. This one (apparently based on a true incident from the Far East in the late 1940s) takes it's time, but as it progresses the momentum of events squeeze and squeeze the human personnel involved until the moment of crisis.Do you believe in fate? It is an issue that has perplexed man since we first began to reason. Are our destinies written out in the stars of astrology, or in the hands of the three Greek "Fates" who spin, measure, and cut our threads? Or is everything done by chance, pure and simple? Years ago I read a portion of an essay by William James (I think it was him) for a philosophy course. James dismissed fate - he felt that the problem with believing in it is that if you decide to go down street A to reach point D a fatalist will say that you were always supposed to do that. But if you go down Street B to reach point D the fatalist would say the same thing, and that didn't sit well with James. But a fatalist would probably point out that as you went on that occasion only by one of those routes, that is the destined route you had to take at that occasion. So who can really know? In THE NIGHT MY NUMBER CAME UP, Michael Redgrave is a British Air Marshall who must go on a mission with several others, including Denholm Elliot and Alexander Knox in one of the military Dakotas used in World War II. There would be nothing wrong about this, but Michael Hordern who is in charge of arranging the trip has just had a nightmare wherein Redgrave, Elliot, Knox, and several others are traveling to the location of this mission (which Hordern did not know about when he went to bed that night) in a Dakota that is in mechanical difficulties and in very bad weather. In fact, it is crashing on a beach.Hordern makes the mistake of telling this to the three of them, and while Redgrave pooh-poohs it, Elliot and Knox are not as certain (although Knox pretends it is all nonsense). Among other things, a major political figure (Ralph Truman) is supposed to be on the plane too in the dream, and he is not scheduled to attend the mission that Redgrave is going on. So the preparations go ahead. But point by point, little things from the dream begin to fall into place in the real world. For example, at a stopover, Truman suddenly shows up - he has to go by the Dakota on a separate trip, hooking up to another flight later on. Also there are a certain number of passengers, including a noisy one, who are to be on the plane. Everyone is happy when the number of passengers goes down, but it goes up as well. Then a rather noisy, boisterous businessman (George Rose, naturally), comes on board - literally manipulating his way on board when initially kept off by Elliot and Knox (he circumvents them going to Redgrave and Truman).So the circumstances grow in the small world of that pressurized cabin as the passengers watch amazed at how good weather collapses and engine problems multiply (they can't raise the plane above a certain level outside the storm due to a pressurization problem - ironically enough). But Redgrave maintains his icy calm throughout the situation - he is determined that he and the others are not going to give into panic over the paranormal.The film is excellent in tackling this type of situation in a serious way. In the end it does not matter if you are a fatalist or not, the film will carry you to to it's conclusion successfully.One final minor point. I don't know much about the scrap metal business, but this film (made in 1955) and the Judy Holliday movie BORN YESTERDAY (1950) and one classic sequence in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946) with Dana Andrews and the scrapped fleet of bombers are the only ones that seem to tackle this growing big business. A lot of military hardware was there for the taking after 1945. In BORN YESTERDAY, Harry (Broderick Crawford) owns junk yards and has built a local empire on scrap metal (and is in Washington to try to get the laws altered to expand his business). Here, George Rose (an English counterpart to Harry) is trying to get on the flight in order to get to Japan for an important conference dealing with British scrap metal interests in the Far East (and he constantly mentions the American competition as intense - a nod to Crawford?). It's almost enough to start a college study into the post war scrap metal business!