If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

How this film can be taken seriously is beyond me. The premise of a plane in trouble over the ocean is interesting. But this movie then completely destroys any such optimistic anticipation. A few of the highlights:Sarcastic comments from airline clerks gossiping about their passengers. Joy Kim as a caricature of the simpleton Asian who fawns over Americans. This along with an equally slow-minded Swedish immigrant with an accent that sounds half Italian. What does this say about arrogant attitudes toward foreigners in the early 50's? An embarrassingly endless closeup scene of makeup removal for unknown effect. Uninteresting flash backs of unsympathetic passengers solely interested in maximizing their personal pleasures. Stone-faced John Wayne saving the day by slapping his copilot silly.As another reviewer said, I wished that all 4 engines had failed and the whole lot of them put to a quick end, along with this painfully tasteless and tacky movie.

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.

This movie had shades of Stagecoach, and JW didn't do much acting, no one really did, but who cares...again its the mold for most airline, airplane movies. Its a trip back to the 50s-60s. Its fun to watch. Airplane CEOs should be made to watch this movie; imagine all the seats are first class...booze is poured from a quart bottle, the stewardess asks, asks, you if your ready to eat...and how you want your stake cooked...men are dressed in suits and women in dresses...everybody used suit cases for luggage...and people were polite; the rich sat with the working class. I remember flying in the late 50s...no jets, prop planes, but a lovely flight...the companies made us feel like we were guests, and we were treated like important guests; not so today...we are treated like prisoners/scum by the airlines and airports. I miss flying, but its not worth it today...I'll drive.

This is by no means a bad film. It's just not terribly original. The area of film-making where the plane gets into trouble and everyone's story on-board the plane gets told and why they're there was started with "Phonecall from a Stranger". A very fine film with Bette Davis in a minor role.This was a good watch but right off you already know the ending so what your in for is the stories from each passenger. What put them there and they tell their story and what not. All good actors in here but as I mention, not original.If you wanna get an idea of a good film with an airplane scenario...try a better film before this was made..."Island in the Sky". It's miles above this one in terms of enjoyment and edge of your seat thrills. You won't waste your time with this one and it has a lot of good points but go and find "Phonecall from a Stranger" and see what I mean.