Zero Hour!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWI3JZvvbI4

Charlottesville

August 2, 2022

Zero Hour! is a 1957 drama film directed by Hall Bartlett from a screenplay by Arthur Hailey, Hall Bartlett and John Champion. It stars Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden and features Peggy King, Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch, Geoffrey Toone and Jerry Paris in supporting roles. The film was released by Paramount Pictures.

Plot

During the closing days of the Second World War, six members of the Royal Canadian Air Force fighter squadron led by pilot Ted Stryker are killed because of a command decision made by him. Years later, in civilian life in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a guilt-stricken Stryker goes through many jobs, and his marriage is in trouble.

Stryker finds a note at home: his wife Ellen has taken their young son Joey and is leaving him, flying to Vancouver. He rushes to Winnipeg Airport to board the same flight, Cross-Canada Air Lines Flight 714. He asks his wife for one last chance, but Ellen says that she can no longer love a man she does not respect.

Stewardess Janet Turner begins the meal service, offering meat or fish as the choices. When a number of passengers and the co-pilot begin feeling sick, a doctor aboard determines that the fish is the cause. The pilot also become seriously ill and cannot fly the airplane. Before he passes out, he turns on the autopilot.

The stewardess determines that Stryker is the only passenger with flying experience, but he has not flown in 10 years and has never piloted an aircraft of this size. Owing to dense fog, Flight 714 cannot land at Calgary and any other airport east of the Canadian Rockies, but must continue on to Vancouver.

Stryker's superior in the war, the tough-minded Captain Treleaven, is summoned to Vancouver Airport. Treleaven blames Stryker for the wartime deaths and has no faith in him. However, he has no choice but to work with him, getting him familiarized with the airplane and teaching him how to land. Ellen joins her husband in the cockpit to handle the radio.

As they approach Vancouver, it is shrouded in fog. Treleaven orders him to circle, for hours if necessary, in the hope that it will lift, but Stryker decides to try to land immediately because passengers will die if they do not get medical treatment soon. Stryker makes a rough landing, but none of the passengers are injured. He has conquered his demons and regained the respect of both Ellen and Captain Treleaven.

Reception

The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther called Zero Hour! an "exciting contemplation of a frightening adventure in the skies" based on a "good terse script ... Dana Andrews as the hero and Sterling Hayden as the captain are first-rate in these roles, keeping them hard and unrelenting." Time magazine, however, called the script a "bloopy inflation of a 1956 television show" and said its "moral struggle comes off fairly well, but the general situation is as patently contrived as one of Walter Mitty's daydreams.”

In 1971, the film was remade as a made-for-television movie, Terror in the Sky, a Movie of the Week special with Doug McClure in the Ted Stryker role (renamed George Spencer). Zero Hour! was also used as the basis for the parody film Airplane! (1980). Because Zero Hour! was owned at the time by Paramount Pictures, the makers of Airplane!, also a Paramount feature, were able to use the screenplay almost verbatim, including the hero again being named Ted Striker.

Screenplay writer Hailey went on to write the popular 1968 novel Airport, which revisited the air disaster genre and led to a film franchise that was also spoofed by Airplane! and its own sequel.