No Highway in the Sky (1951)

Directed by Henry Koster

We’ve been watching a lot of old British films lately at our house, and in the process we’ve learned a lot about works of art that are quite good, without any pretensions to greatness or any need to clear some enormous expense in production. Just as there’s nothing grander than an epic that succeeds, so there’s nothing more embarrassing than an epic that flops. Filet mignon is great, but you can’t live on that alone; you need potatoes and vegetables and fruit, too, and sometimes a good hamburger from the grill is exactly right. Our Film of the Week features several giants of the movie industry in America and England: Jimmy Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, and Jack Hawkins, and a very strong supporting cast. But No Highway in the Sky is a straightforward story about decent human beings, told in a suspenseful but straightforward way.

The setup is this. An industrial physicist, Dr. Theodore Honey (Jimmy Stewart), is persuaded that the new line of British passenger airplanes suffers from a dangerous flaw. It’s that, after a certain number of hours in the air, what we now call “metal fatigue” will stress the tail beyond what it can sustain; it will fall, and the plane will crash. He’s rigged up a huge machine that shakes the metal to simulate the vibrations it will endure in flight, and sure enough, at 1400 hours, the physical composition of the metal is altered, and what once looked as firm as steel begins to wrinkle and warp. Dr. Honey tries to persuade Dennis Scott, the chief of metallurgy at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, that the planes are speeding toward disaster. Scott (Jack Hawkins) isn’t sure whether to believe him, and it’s not just because nobody wants to hear bad news, or because a lot of money is on the line. Dr. Honey is absent-minded in the extreme, and a bit wide-eyed and too insistent; his wife, we learn, was killed by a bomb during the Blitz, and so we fear that his feelings may be getting the better of him. But the RAE in fact has just lost an airplane in the mountains between Labrador and Quebec. Honey believes it must have been caused by the problem with the metal in the tail.

Much of the film is devoted to a flight from England to Newfoundland, as Honey goes out there to investigate, and he finds out, while he is on a plane of the same make, that it has already logged more than 1400 hours of flight, and that, according to his calculations, they will never make it to North America. One of the passengers on board with him is an American actress, Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich), with whom he shares his concerns. He persuades her. But how do you persuade the pilot and the co-pilot (Kenneth More; you may know him as the lead role in the great film about the Titanic, A Night to Remember)?

There are some twists to the plot that I won’t reveal, but at heart this is a story about a man who knows something but who cannot be, despite what he claims, absolutely certain about it, and whose behavior otherwise doesn’t inspire confidence; and others, who are trying very hard to be both responsible and level-headed, when the one is not quite compatible with the other. Watch this film for the performances, and note how often, too, the script does not follow what would become standard issue for overdone and star-heavy disaster movies with cartoon villains, like The Towering Inferno.

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