THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965) ** Very, very dry (!), long film about a bunch of guys plane-wrecked in the Sahara. Character studies, you see; no way they'd make a decent-budget film with this kind of all-star cast and not a single woman in it, these days; Salma Hayek would at least wander past on a camel selling them couscous and battin' her eyes at one of 'em, leaving the guy moaning for the rest of the film, and everyone else something to talk about... That she doesn't may help on the realism side, but it's at best a mixed blessing. Anyway, as I said it's a great cast-too great to ever let the film deservedly collapse on its merits-but the only time they ever truly rise to the occasion is a series of exchanges between Jimmy Stewart and Richard Attenborough. Much of the rest is lost, wasted, never properly deployed or never had a chance. It gives you plenty of time to think about other things, one being whether this might-with its international host of characters-be in some way an allegory on the role of the Nazi elite in the evolution of the OSS to the CIA...Ernest Borgnine is in it, after all, and he shows up in the strangest films about the weirdest and most hidden things, and that British trinity, and the French walking away... But then you think it could as easily be a metaphor about the pyramids, with Stewart as Akhenaten or somebody, and Dan Duryea and George Kennedy as slaves or camels. The pithy bit to it, I believe, is Jimmy's journal entry about the guys with slide rules inheriting the earth.
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