Best movie of this year hands down!

ridiculous rating

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This is a film which will stay with you for a long time. Its title sets the tone for what follows : a flight which, as it continues, looks more and more to be one that will end in disaster and thus, apparently, mean that a man's dream regarding it will come frighteningly true. The increasing sense of foreboding is alleviated at one time or another by a development that appears to be at odds with the dream, that is, until something else transpires which then sees the exact circumstances of the dream restored. It is a film which, not unnaturally, gives rise to tension-laden conversations about whether there is such a thing as fate, but that is not the main impact of this film, which is that one's attention is riveted from the opening scene to the final shocking end. until

It seems to me that in making this film they were trying to replicate past successes with The Halfway House and Dead of Night.Part of the problem with this film is because we are given the details of Michael Horse's dream at the beginning we know what is going to happen so there is not a great deal of suspense.It also seems as if the producers are giving the plane every conceivable problem.The radio fails,the cabin is not pressurised and there is no radar.It seems almost inconceivable that the plane would have no radar,and that the navigator was so incompetent that the aircraft would be flying around in circles.Entertaining but no classic.

This was the seventh and last film I watched in tribute to movie critic Leslie Halliwell, since it was singled out as a favourite despite receiving a measly * in his guide; on the other hand, Leonard Maltin surprisingly went all the way and rated it ****! For the record, though it has been released on DVD, my copy was culled from a TV broadcast marred by brief instances of picture loss midway through! Ealing Studios are perhaps best-known today for their series of classic comedies, but they produced all kinds of films during their tenure: one of their biggest successes was the horror compendium DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), which had a circular structure that saw events depicted in a dream coming true in reality. This movie, also made by them, follows a similar premise and starred Michael Redgrave (who was the protagonist of the most famous episode from the earlier title)! Incidentally, I was under the impression that he would play the man prophetically hallucinating of a military-plane crash that was carrying the unlucky amount of 13 passengers, but it turned out to be Michael Hordern (who only appears at the beginning and end of the film, to indicate the exact location of the wreck and confess to a new nightmare respectively) – whereas the one who is most disturbed by the eerie coincidences between fantasy and fact is first-time flying civilian diplomat Alexander Knox! In this respect, the first person title is all the more misleading since Hordern is never on the beleaguered flight to begin with.The movie (scripted by the distinguished playwright R.C. Sheriff) can be seen as a precursor to the heyday of airline disaster epics – exemplified by the AIRPORT outings and spoofed by the AIRPLANE ones – but there were actually already quite a few of its ilk made around this time, including the star-studded NO HIGHWAY (1951; adapted by Sheriff himself from the Nevil Shute novel…and which I caught intermittently on Italian TV years ago, but do own a copy of and will be watching presently) and Ernest K. Gann's THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954; acquired via Paramount's "John Wayne Collection" Special Edition DVD and, in retrospect, decidedly overrated). Anyway, the title under review milks every ounce of drama and suspense from the central situation, giving plenty of opportunity to a cast peppered with familiar faces (including a young Denholm Elliott); we even get the journey interrupted, so that those in the know believe that the danger has passed, only for it to resume once more with 13 passengers (two soldiers having been replaced by the last-minute induction of a loud-mouthed businessman and his secretary)! By the way, the Chinese/Japanese setting was an unusual one for a British production…and I just have to wonder whether this was imported to the latter Asian country and what its people may have made of the result – since the airborne calamity occurs when the route is detoured so that, rather morbidly, a look could be taken at the nuclear-ravaged cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!! Finally, the movie was perhaps its director's most significant effort (landing four BAFTA nominations) and, to go back to the reason why I watched this now, it is worth noting that his son – Barry Norman – would himself become a renowned film reviewer

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!