Zero Hour!

source: Zero Hour!

In 2010 Zero Hour! is as funny as Airplane!, only it wasn't meant to be at the time. Kudos to TCM for showing it immediately following Airplane. Great to see Dana Andrews when young, and planes had cockpits you could just walk into. If you're a fan of Airplane, or post-war movies, this is a must see. i hadn't seen it in decades before TCM showed them back to back last night, great job TCM. What, the review has to be 10 lines long? Well, just picture during this black and white movie while Joey is in the cockpit the Captain saying, "Jimmy, did you ever see a grown man naked?" This was enjoyable to watch just being a fan of 50s movies, double so being a longtime fan of Airplane!

A film so stupid it's become a camp classic and the subject of ridicule for many years. AIRPLANE lifted entire portion of this insanity finding it a goldmine of ridiculousness. After the crew is put out of commission with food poison, PTS basket-case Dana Andrews takes the helm and, along with his icy wife Linda Darnell, attempts to land the plane. They're helped along from the ground by Sterling Hayden. Directed by Hall Bartlett and with a script by none other than Arthur Hailey, this has to rank as one of goofiest serious films ever. Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch and Jerry Paris co-star. Hayden actually utters the line "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking."

Arthur Hailey co-scripted this adaptation of his "story" (actually his play, the uncredited "Flight Into Danger") along with director Hall Bartlett and producer John C. Champion about an airliner crippled mid-flight when the crew and most of the passengers are stricken from bacteria-laced fish. Dana Andrews plays a war-scarred ex-fighter pilot haunted by his record in WWII who is the only person aboard adequately prepared to land the plane; he gets his radio instructions via land from Sterling Hayden, who just happened to be Andrews' wartime adversary! Mediocre in all aspects, but still thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable. The plot and characters should be recognizable to fans of the 1980 satire "Airplane!"...however this one is already spoofy as all get-out (though it doesn't mean to be), starting with that grave narration. Linda Darnell's role as Andrews' estranged wife and reluctant co-pilot is a scream (she has no faith in her nervous husband, yet near the finish glows with wifely pride). Andrews and Hayden act it to the hilt, while the dialogue becomes entrenched in a kind of quotable inanity ("He can't land that plane in this soup!"). Nothing to take seriously, but fun nevertheless. *** from ****

Yes the others are spot on when Airplane! is invoked...but I think a truly great film maker also watched and lifted the character of Zero Hour! Stanley Kubrick. The cockpit scenes are so Dr Strangelove looking and feeling that one has to consider if this is where Kubrick looked for production design inspiration for the classic Slim Pickens scenes. Certainly looks and feels that way to this viewer. A Kubrick documentary has some bits about how the Dept of Defense was very curious about how accurate Stanley was in the instruments and layout of the Strangelove plane. Watch ZH and I think its pretty odvious. And a big Thank You TCM for putting Airplane! and ZH back-to-back for what is undoubtedly great film viewing.

I defy anyone to watch this film on its own terms. You sit down in front of the TV with the best will in the world, and then Crazylegs Hirsch asks the little boy if he's ever been in a cockpit before, and suddenly you're rolling on the floor. What's amazing is how many of the jokes in *Airplane* work even though they parody specific moments in this movie (which fairly few people had seen). "How about some coffee, Johnny?" "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." "He's a menace to himself and everything else in the air!" "Stewardess? I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor." "It's a different kind of flying altogether." I do wonder why they dropped the Jerry Paris character, who seems like he would have been a rich subject for parody.

Ignore reader comments that say that the movie "Airplane!" by Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker is a "rip-off" of "Zero Hour." Airplane was a SPOOF of Zero Hour - not a rip-off. One would think "Airplane!" was a spoof on "Airport" - and in a way it was, but watch "Zero Hour" and you'll see their real inspiration. If watch Airplane first, then Zero Hour, you'll find Zero Hour to be a very (unintentionally) funny COMEDY! The AIRPLANE writers even pulled one ridiculous line from Zero Hour, untouched: "The life of everybody on board depends on one thing. Finding somebody on board who not only can fly the plane, but didn't have fish for dinner."

It's funny, but despite "Zero Hour!" being an excellent and tautly written movie, I found myself laughing periodically throughout the film--and there's a good chance you will too if you watch this movie. It isn't because it's a comedy (far from it), but because the 1980s comedy "Airplane!" is basically a re-make of this 1957--but with all the insane Zucker-Abrams humor. So many times, you'll notice that "Zero Hour!" says the exact same lines and has the exact same plot you'll find in the later comedy film. It's a shame, really, as some might think the folks remade "Zero Hour!" or poked fun of it because it was a bad film--and it's among the best of the air disaster films ever made. Plus, coming back in the 1950s, it was NOT a cliché--but fresh and exciting...unlike later dreck like "Airport '75" and "Airport '79"--films that truly deserved to be parodied and mocked. The film begins with a guy named Ted Stryker (yes, the same name as the guy Robert Hayes played in "Airplane!") but this time it's played by the ever-dependable Dana Andrews. Like in "Airplane!", he's a combat vet with PTSD and blames himself for the deaths of six pilots--but it happened in Europe, not Macho Grande! And, like in the latter film, tainted fish cause the crew and many of the passengers to become violently ill. And, like the later film, it's up to Andrews and an old WWII pilot who knows him (Sterling Hayden) to talk him through the landing process. Despite all these similarities, the film is first-rate. Hayden and Andrews are both two of my favorite actors of the era because neither one was a "pretty boy" and they excelled at playing realistic characters--real guys who rise to the occasion when the need arises. Not macho...just real men with real problems and real grit. The script sure helped as well--it didn't seem ridiculous but managed to create wonderful tension and kept me riveted. Overall, an excellent and often ignored film. See it yourself and see why it as well as "The High and the Mighty" are two airplane disaster movies that manage to pack a lot of entertainment more than 50 years later.

_Airplane!_ was so closely based on this movie that the list of DIFFERENCES between this movie and _Airplane!_ is shorter than the list of similarities. Some of the differences between _Zero Hour!_ and _Airplane!_ are: *) The only two characters with the same names are Ted Striker and Joey. *) In ZH, Ted Striker's ill-fated air raid during the War was dramatized in its entirety at the beginning of the movie, not reconstructed piecemeal in flashbacks over the course of the film -- although Ted did have a couple of flashbacks in ZH at crucial moments. *) The flight in ZH is a DC-4 carrying 38 passengers from Calgary to Vancouver, BC. The airspeed indicator for the DC-4 only went up to 250 miles per hour. *) In ZH, Ellen (the character that became Elaine in _Airplane!_) was Ted Striker's wife, and Joey was his son. Joey was among the unlucky passengers who ate fish (halibut) instead of meat (lamb chops), and he gets so sick that he symbolically breaks the toy airplane the pilot had given him. *) The pilot in ZH succumbs to food poisoning slowly, and manages to keep the plane under control for an hour or so, thanks to a morphine injection administered by the Doctor, until he finally collapses. The automatic pilot (not inflatable, of course) was already engaged by then. *) Nothing like the Knute-Rockne-based inspirational speech that the Doctor gave to Ted Striker in _Airplane!_ is anywhere to be found in ZH. *) In ZH, the unmarried stewardess had a boyfriend on board who tried to cheer up Joey with a glove-puppet. *) A tense moment happens in ZH where the plane's radio accidentally gets knocked off the proper frequency and Ted Striker is on his own, cut off from communication with the ground, until Ted and Mrs. Striker can find the frequency again. This sequence does not appear in _Airplane!_. *) In ZH, when the air traffic controllers went looking for Ted Striker's old commanding Captain, they first had to call his babysitter at home (who had Elvis Presley turned up way too loud on the TV to hear them), and then had to call a nightclub where said Captain and his wife were dancing to an equally-loud jazz band.

And you thought the dialogue and acting went over the top in "Airplane," huh? Thank you TCM for running this the other day. I had never seen it before, but wait a minute, sure I had... dozens of times. That's what made the ZH viewing such a hoot. ZAZ did such a fine job colorizing "Zero Hour!" I had the whole script memorized. If you have grown slightly weary from repeated "Airplane" yukfests, find a copy of its propellorized progenitor and enjoy the comedy anew. So true is the original to its parody (note the deliberate juxtaposition) I half expected Geoffrey Toone's (Dr. Baird) nose to grow as he attempted to calm the passengers. All that was missing was June Cleaver's "Jive Talkin'!"