Высота и мощь (Vysota i moshch')

1954 film

The High and the Mighty is a 1954 American aviation disaster film, directed by William A. Wellman, and written by Ernest K. Gann, who also wrote the 1953 novel on which his screenplay was based.

In Honolulu, a DC 4 airliner prepares to take off for San Francisco with 17 passengers and a crew of 5. Former captain Dan Roman, the flight's veteran first officer, known for his habit of whistling, is haunted by an air crash that killed his wife and son and left him with a permanent limp. The captain, John Sullivan, suffers from a secret fear of responsibility after logging thousands of hours looking after the lives of passengers and aircrew. Young second officer Hobie Wheeler and veteran navigator Lenny Wilby are contrasts in age and experience. Meanwhile, flight attendant Spalding attends to her passengers, each with varying personal problems, including jaded former actress May Holst, unhappily married heiress Lydia Rice, aging beauty queen Sally McKee, and cheerful vacationer Ed Joseph. Spalding befriends the terminally ill Frank Briscoe, after being charmed by his pocket watch. A last minute arrival, Humphrey Agnew, causes the aircrew concern with his odd behavior. After a routine departure, the airliner experiences sporadic, sudden vibrations. Although the aircrew senses that something may be wrong with the propellers, they cannot locate a problem. When a vibration causes Spalding to burn her hand, Dan inspects the tail compartment but still finds nothing wrong. After nightfall, as the airliner passes the point of no return, Agnew confronts fellow passenger Ken Childs, accusing him of having an affair with his wife. The men struggle and Agnew pulls out a pistol, intending to shoot Childs, but before he can do so, the airliner swerves violently when it loses a propeller and its engine catches fire. The crew quickly extinguishes the fire, but the engine has twisted off its mounting. In mid ocean, the aircrew radios for help and sets in motion a rescue operation. Dan discovers that the airliner is now losing fuel from additional damage to a wing tank. That, combined with adverse winds and the increased drag of the damaged engine, means that the airliner will eventually run out of fuel and be forced to ditch. Unassuming José Locota disarms Agnew and confiscates the pistol, compelling him to sit quietly. Gustave Pardee, who up until now has made no secret of his fear of flying, inspires calm in his terrified fellow passengers. Dan calmly explains the situation, trying to lessen their anxiety, but warns that their chances of making the coast are "one in a thousand". The passengers rally around each other and find changed perspectives about their existing problems. They toss luggage from the airliner to lighten its weight, with May Holst literally kissing her mink coat goodbye. In San Francisco, Manager Tim Garfield comes to the airline's operations center but has little hopes for the airliner's chances. A favorable change in the winds raises the crew's hopes that they have just enough fuel to reach San Francisco, but Wilby discovers that he made an elementary error in navigation and their actual remaining time in the air remains inadequate. Dan's experience tells him that their luck would be better trying to make land than ditching in rough seas at night. Sullivan panics and prepares to ditch immediately, but Dan slaps him back to his senses. Thinking clearly again, Sullivan decides against ditching. As the airliner approaches rain swept, night time San Francisco at a perilously low altitude, the airport prepares for an emergency instrument landing. The airliner narrowly surmounts the city's hills and breaks out of the clouds with the runway lights dead ahead, guiding them to a safe landing. As the passengers disembark, Garfield watches their reactions as they are harried by reporters. After the tumult dies down, he joins the aircrew inspecting their damaged engine and informs Dan that only 30 gallons of fuel remained in their tanks. Dan acknowledges the gamble they took and walks away, limping and whistling into the night. "So long you ancient pelican", Garfield mutters to himself.

After Wayne and Robert Fellows had formed Wayne Fellows Productions in 1952, the duo worked on several films including Big Jim McLain, Plunder of the Sun, and Island in the Sky. It was a widescreen projection process that involved using an anamorphic lens to widen the image produced by regular 35 mm film. Wellman's experience was that the CinemaScope camera was "bulky and unwieldy", and the director preferred to station the camera in one place. Since The High and Mighty was set on an airliner with cramped quarters, Wellman did not need to worry about flexibility in composing shots. He hired William H. Clothier, with whom he had worked on many films, as cinematographer (assigned to the second unit sequences, only; Archie Stout, with whom Wayne had a long association, had already been assigned as primary cinematographer). Ernest K. Gann wrote the original novels on which both films were based, along with both screenplays, of which both films, including dialogue, were closely adapted. The High and the Mighty depicts a dramatic situation in a civil transport aviation context. Jack L. Warner initially was opposed to the film, believing that audiences would not stay interested in a plot stretching more than 100 minutes involving the passengers in an airliner. William Wellman had reservations about the "intimate" storylines, which dominate the production, preferring to focus more on the airliner and pilots. Yet, after script deliberations set out the final screenplay, he endorsed the novel approach that harkened back to earlier films such as Grand Hotel.

The Douglas DC 4 (N4665V) used to film the daylight flying sequences and the Honolulu "gate" sequence was a former C 54A 10 DC built as a military transport in 1942 at Long Beach, California, by Douglas Aircraft Company. When the exterior and flying sequences were filmed in November 1953, the airliner was being operated by Oakland, California based non scheduled carrier Transocean Airlines(1946–1962), the largest civil aviation operator of converted C 54s in the 1950s, and named "The African Queen".#tag:ref|Ironically, a Transocean sister ship to this aircraft, The Argentine Queen (N4726V), was lost with no survivors while ditching on March 28, 1964, on a flight for another carrier from Honolulu to Los Angeles under circumstances similar to those in The High and the Mighty. This coincidence and the similarity of nicknames has resulted in some sources erroneously reporting this as the aircraft used during filming, but Keating's log book verifies N4665V's role. used to accommodate the loading of freight on pallets, was employed for all shots of the damaged airliner on the ground at San Francisco in the film's closing sequences. A propellerless, fire scorched engine on a distorted mount, with a 30° "droop", was installed on the left wing of this aircraft to represent the damage which had imperiled the flight. Exterior airport scenes were filmed at the Glendale Grand Central Air Terminal, east of Burbank, California, where an outdoor film set was constructed to replicate the terminal gates at SFO in the early 1950s. Additional exteriors shots were taken at Oakland International Airport, including all boarding, engine run up, taxiing, and takeoff scenes used in the opening sequences. The external night and damaged in flight sequences were filmed in a studio where a large scale filming miniature was photographed against backdrops. Passenger cabin and flight deck interior scenes were all filmed on sets built on a Warner Bros. sound stage.

Filming took place from November 16, 1953, to January 11, 1954, on a Goldwyn Pictures lot and Warners soundstages in Hollywood. Additional filming took place in San Francisco as well as at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. Despite the initial issues on set, the two otherwise had a positive relationship and worked together on later films, including Track of the Cat and Blood Alley. Wellman, an accomplished pilot in real life, purposely maintained the point of view of the flight path of the seemingly doomed airliner traveling as the support staff in San Francisco would observe it: flying from the west to the east, from Honolulu to San Francisco, film frame right to film frame left, except during takeoff and landing. Similarly, the U. S. Coast Guard rescue plane was shown flying from San Francisco to towards the stricken airliner, film frame left to film frame right. The film was initially budgeted at $1.32 million, but cost overruns led to a total cost of $1.47 million. For directing, Wellman received $100,000 as well as a portion of the film's profits. Wayne earned $175,000 in addition to a percentage of the film's box office receipts. Wellman ended up casting good but lesser known actors in some of the roles. Spencer Tracy was offered the role of Dan Roman but turned it down because, Wellman said, Tracy found the script "lousy"; assistant director Andrew McLaglen claimed that Tracy's friends told the actor he was "in for an ego bruising ride." It was thought that Tracy, a liberal Democrat, would receive the 'ego bruising' from Wellman a registered Republican. This led Tracy to excuse himself from the film. Without Tracy, Jack Warner threatened to remove the Warner Bros. funding unless another prominent lead actor could be found. Wellman convinced producer and actor John Wayne to replace Tracy in the role. Wayne later said during and after production that he did not like his performance. McLaglen recalled: "He said, 'Well, it never had any love story.' I said 'It had the greatest love story that had ever been written.'" McLaglen and Wayne argued about Wayne's performance, but Wayne never conceded about his performance. For the other major male lead, Wayne had promised the role to his friend Bob Cummings, who was a pilot and had Wellman's recommendation as well. Stanwyck's refusal was especially galling, as the director had always treated her as a "pet". Tiomkin's music topped hit parade charts and remained there for weeks, increasing the film's profile. A 1955 national survey of disc jockeys labeled the song as the "most whistleable tune". Therefore, the song's "haunting strains" were played on the radio and on recordings in the years after the film's release. The film was one of Wayne's co productions in which he also starred, a practice which would not become widespread until the 1980s and 1990s.

The High and the Mighty had its premiere in Hollywood at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on May 27, 1954. Beyond the film's initial run in theaters, it grossed $8.5 million in total box office receipts and was the sixth most popular film of the year in North America. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times called the film "an enormously vital picture, amazingly associated with life's panorama today, and thus filled with a rare kind of tingling excitement, especially for a modern air minded public". The High and the Mighty also received some negative reviews, with Richard Griffin of the Los Angeles Times writing that another reviewer had criticized the cast: "All are fabricated characters—and that is the way they are played". The film holds a 46% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 13 reviews.

Award Category Nominee(s) Result Ref. Academy Awards Best Director William A. Wellman Best Supporting Actress Jan Sterling Claire Trevor Best Film Editing Ralph Dawson Best Original Music Score Dimitri Tiomkin Best Song "The High and the Mighty" Music by Dimitri Tiomkin; Lyrics by Ned Washington Directors Guild of America Awards Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures William A. Wellman Golden Globe Awards Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Jan Sterling Most Promising Newcomer – Female Karen Sharpe

By the 1960s and 1970s, The High and the Mighty became a television staple but, due to tighter broadcast schedules and several royalty disputes, its last appearances on broadcast television were in 1982 on Superstation WTBS, and on Cinemax in March/April 1985. One crucial element in the film's resurrection was the extensive restoration required after decades of languishing in the Wayne film vault, where the film suffered major water damage and one reel was lost for a period of time, making the possibility of such a pristine restoration seemingly unlikely. Significant portions of the film stock showed color fading, which necessitated a restoration process. The restoration took more than a year, and three months were spent on fixing the audio. Demand arose to get the film released in home video formats. The estate of John Wayne, through Gretchen Wayne, the widow of the actor's late son, Michael, made a deal in the early 2000s with Cinetech (film) and Chace Productions (sound) to update and restore both The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky. This led to a distribution agreement with Wayne's production and distribution company Batjac Productions and both American Movie Classics (for TV rights) and Paramount Pictures (home video rights). Following the recovery of the lost reel, The High and the Mighty, after its meticulous restoration, was rebroadcast on television in July 2005, the first broadcasts of the film in 20 years. Together with Island in the Sky, it was released as a "special collector's edition" DVD with new cover art in August of the same year by Paramount Home Entertainment. It was also broadcast on Turner Classic Movies on October 27, 2007.