The Worst Film Ever

One of my all time favorites.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Sam McBane is an executive at Consolidated Airlines. One of Consolidated's passenger planes crashes shortly after takeoff, killing 53 people on board. There is only one survivor, a stewardess. The pilot of the plane was Captain Jack Savage, a long- time friend of Sam's. Sam and Jack flew transport planes together in WW2. Jack was a playboy, and the press are painting him as as irresponsible and undisciplined...and the cause of the crash. Consolidated's CEO and other executives are quite happy to go along with this view, as it makes Jack Savage the sole cause of the crash and absolves them from blame. However, Sam knows better and sets out to find the truth, and hopefully clear his friend.Quite original, in background and ultimate plot. The idea of fate/luck being the cause, rather than anyone's fault, isn't something that gets explored often. In fact, nowadays it is quite a radical notion as in our litigious, blame-finding society people always want to find something or someone, other than themselves, to blame for their misfortunes.Very engaging too, as we see the Sam and Jack's history in WW2 and get to know Jack (especially) and Sam's characters.Was set up for a very profound ending but, while it was practical and satisfying, it really could have done with something more philosophical. The end result felt a bit clumsy and devalued the bigger point to an extent.Overall, a very good movie but could have been brilliant.

Imperfect, and not even remotely true to Gann's aviation classic upon which it is purportedly based, Fate is the Hunter is nonetheless a fine and compelling film.Essentially a character study and technological "whodunnit", an airline executive strives to exonerate the pilot after a deadly airliner crash. While some minor spoiler to this review, I will not give away the big surprise behind the cause of the accident.But there is some interesting speculation about the peculiar-looking airliner central to the movie. A modern jetliner (of its time) that resembled nothing in aviation. Why did they take a DC-6 and replace the wings, modify the nose and tail and stick on prosthetic jet engines - when they could have just as readily used off-the-shelf models and real aircraft, at lesser cost?The answer lies in the accident and nature of its cause. No aircraft company - Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed, BAC, etc, wold put up with having their aircraft associated with such a story. The airliner had to be completely fictional.

It certainly looks as if the whimsical, Byronic airline captain Rod Taylor is responsible for this accident, which left 52 people dead, himself included, sparing only Susanne Pleshette, the flight attendant. The airline traffic safety board convenes and, despite the strong reservations of executive Glenn Ford, an old friend of Taylor's, is headed towards the dreaded explanation of "pilot error." You see, Taylor was observed patronizing several bars the night before the flight, in the company of someone named Mickey who can't be located. Taylor had a history of cheerful abandon even during the war and he's a kind of convenient scapegoat alright.Glenn Ford, however, is convinced that some other force was at work. He tracks down some old friends of Taylor's and they all vouch for his probity. At the last minute, the mysterious and alcoholic Mickey shows up and reveals that although Taylor bought a dozen drinks the night before the accident, they were all for him, Mickey, not for Taylor Not good enough for the Board of Inquisitors. If it wasn't booze, what was it? Taylor apparently lost one engine after another shortly after take off then, perhaps in a panic, plowed into a pier that no one knew was there.Taking his cue from the gorgeous Nancy Kwan, an oceanographer who had a perfectly innocent meeting with Taylor, Ford advances the novel proposition before the board that if it wasn't mechanical failure and it wasn't pilot error, then it must have been -- "the supernatural." Yes, girls and boys, FATE is the hunter. What else could have brought all these conditions together -- the flight of birds, the engine failure, the unknown pier, the radio failure -- at exactly the right time and place to cause the accident except -- fate.Actually, you don't have to dig into the supernatural (or reach skyward) for that. It can be explained by a simple and drab deterministic universe. Everything that happens at a given place and time is determined by a multitude of previous events. One thing causes another and every once in a while they come together in a wildly improbable manner to cause something more important than all of them put together. You will sometimes have a perfect accident just as you will sometimes have a "perfect storm." Ford may call it Fate but I'd call it statistical probability.That's a little egg-headed, I know, but the explanation is never explored anyway. It all turns out to have to do with a paper cup of coffee that spilled on Taylor's pedestal when the first engine quit and the airplane jarred momentarily. The coffee dripped into an electrical unit and shorted out some other circuits and caused all sorts of false alarms, to which Taylor unwittingly responded. That was fate in a cup of coffee. Maxwell House, I hope.Harold Medford wrote the screenplay which has practically nothing to do with Ernet K. Gann's superb memoirs with the same title. I imagine Medford being handed the assignment with directions something like this. "We've got the rights to Gann's book. Now make up a story that will fit the title. And we've got Glenn Ford, Nancy Kwan, Dorothy Malone, Susanne Pleshette, Mark Stevens, and some reliable supporting players, so squeeze all of them in. Try to make the story about airplanes." Not much from the book appears in the movie. Sometimes events show up but in altered form. It was Gann who played the concertina, not a friend. And it was Gann who got the garter of the famous lady on the USO tour during the war, only the famous lady wasn't Jane Russell but Marlene Dietrich.Oh, hell. You want a bewitching story about fate and flying? Read the book.

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.