Baseshment
I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
Merolliv
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
secondtake
Fate is the Hunter (1964)A melodrama with a failed airplane at the center of things, and so many implausible aspects it's hard to really follow it through without a groan. Glenn Ford is a terrific actor but he depends on his grimness to such a uniform extreme here it's oppressive. And idea of defending an old war buddy is great, and of duplicating the events leading to a plane crash, too, but it is taken to great extremes.Not that it isn't interesting, for sure, in ways. But coincidences mount, and then that darned coffee cup spilling into the electronics. Gosh, no one thought that might be a problem?Check out the shot of the airplane with sandbags with all their seatbelts on for passengers. A funny moment. There are war flashbacks, a pair of stewardesses who catch the pilot's eye, and the alcoholic buddy who comes through in the end. It's a simple idea stretched into a barely tolerable two hours. Nicely made and nicely shot, and with decent acting all around, but trapped in a strange narrative.
cherimerritt
This movie is one of my all-time favorites that I'm happy to share tonight with my movie-buff husband who has never seen it. (I'll bet Tony DiNozzo would remember it, though.) I've been trying to remember the title for ages (couldn't recall Rod Taylor's last name to look it up online. Getting senile I guess.)I agree with Roscoe-4. "It illustrates the many zany and unusual things that can happen to change our lives forever." The actual cause of this plane crash has stuck with me since I first saw the film over 30 years ago on TV. Many times I have caught myself in the midst of a possible negative chain-of-events and changed something I was doing because of this movie (especially if there was a cup of coffee involved in what I was doing). It also probably lead to my interest in Multivariate Statistics (quantification of the phenomenon of multiple variables leading to a single outcome.)Personally, I think everyone should see this film. At least it tells a person to keep looking deeper for causes instead of assuming that "what you think is accurate" is also worth believing just because "it makes sense" to you. "It makes sense" should never be enough by itself to lead us all the way to a conclusion.
graduatedan
Ernest K Gann, the author of Fate is the hunter,reportedly was unhappy with this interpretation of his 1961 memoir of the same name. Having read the book, I can understand why he might have felt that way. Gann's memoir is a rich tapestry of a flyer's life from biplane to four engine passenger airliner,while Harold Medford's screenplay is really just a pastiche of some of the story threads in the book.Having said that, Fate is the Hunter the film, stands on its own as an immensely satisfying story that takes an increasingly strong grip on the viewer and never lets go. Rod Taylor plays airline captain Jack Savage, who's killed along with his crew and passengers in the crash of the fictional Consolidated Airlines flight 22. Airline VP McBain, played by Glenn Ford, believes something other than pilot error was responsible for the disaster, but must battle his own colleagues and public perception of Savage in order to clear the dead pilot's name. The film, shot in cinemascope, uses the wide screen effectively, and the crisp editing advances the story without sacrificing the narrative flow. All of the actors acquit themselves well,and Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score hits just the right note of melancholy. This is a sad, yet ultimately uplifting film, and although Gann might not have liked the result, the finished movie does manage to retain the tone and philosophy of his fabulous book.
moonspinner55
Ernest K. Gann's book becomes interesting, somewhat unusual and gripping drama involving a doomed airliner, on a routine flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, which loses its first engine--and then, apparently, its second--and crashes just after takeoff, leaving only one survivor (a remarkably uninjured stewardess). Glenn Ford is the investigator for the airline company who is pressured by board members into blaming the entire disaster on pilot Rod Taylor, an old military friend; Ford is uninterested in using the pilot as a scapegoat, instead putting his job on the line and searching out the actual reason the plane went down. Many issues this film brings up are still remarkably relevant today (pilot error, bird feathers jamming the engine, the possibility of a bomb), yet director Ralph Nelson stages some of the more dramatic sequences like cheapjack incidents from a TV serial. The cockpit action (including flashbacks to the war) is highly unconvincing, and the picture is further handicapped by disappointing visual effects. Ford's low-key work holds the movie together, and he's matched by Suzanne Pleshette, Nancy Kwan, and Nehemiah Persoff (playing an associate of Ford's who is eager to have his job). Taylor is too 'colorful' and overdoes it, and the flashback structure renders the film episodic, though the finale is good (if far-fetched) and the nasty politics of airline business are successfully brought off. **1/2 from ****
