Sam also hears good and bad about Jack from people who knew him: another old flying buddy (Wally Cox), an heiress to whom Jack was engaged (Dorothy Malone), Jack's girlfriend of a few weeks (Nancy Kwan) and a flyer who became an alcoholic (Mark Stevens). Sam remembers his own wartime experiences flying with the fearless and daring Jack. Sabotage and mechanical failure appear to be ruled out, yet personnel executive Sam McBane (Glenn Ford) refuses to write off pilot Jack Savage (Rod Taylor) as the cause of the crash, even though character witnesses say he was drinking before the flight. And it doesn't hurt that star Glenn Ford turns in a caring performance, in a show he might easily have felt beneath his star status.Ī Consolidated Air jetliner crashes soon after takeoff from LAX, and a whirlwind investigation begins.
#TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN MOVIE MOVIE#
The genre-based pulp of Fate is the Hunter seems perfect for Nelson's talents - the movie is unpretentious entertainment, with a steady turnover of interesting characters. It's an especially good movie for director Ralph Nelson, who struck gold with some assignments ( Lilies of the Field, Soldier in the Rain) but fell on his face with so-called important subject matter: Duel at Diablo, Charly, Soldier Blue. The surprise is that the film's drama is compelling and the flashbacks are gracefully handled. On the surface it's another plane crash epic that grinds out an evening's entertainment through soap operatic flashbacks about doomed passengers. Like the big '50s hit The High and the Mighty, Fate is the Hunter is from a book by Ernest K. if you're curious, the spoiler is not hard to find on the web. I was surprised to find that Fate is the Hunter is quite a good movie, even though its "crucial twist" sounds humorous when taken out of context. This made it all the more jaw-dropping when we eventually caught up with The Crowded Sky, The High and the Mighty, Cone of Silence and Zero Hour! Parts of each of them did indeed play as unintentional comedies.
With the advent of cable TV, local-broadcast perennials like Fate disappeared from the airwaves. A list of pictures that provided the source material for Airplane! prominently included Fate. I assumed that Fate was a dog of a movie, an assumption reinforced when Jon Davison's 1980 air disaster spoof Airplane! arrived. One of the films the Lampoon so happily trashed was 1964's Fate is the Hunter, an aviation movie about the investigation of an airline crash with a heavy loss of life. I first heard the word "spoiler" back in the 1970s, when The National Lampoon magazine offered a sardonic article spoiling dozens of books and movies, essentially revealing the twist ending or the trick finish of pictures like Soylent Green and Citizen Kane. let's hope that they also get to bumping John Huston's superlative The Kremlin Letter to Blu-ray.
#TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN MOVIE UPGRADE#
TT is set to upgrade its old DVD of Violent Saturday soon. The third of the Twilight Time DVD discs that debuted in 2011 was Fate is the Hunter, an overlooked suspense thriller from the early 1960s. Written by Harold Medford from the book by Ernest K. Starring Glenn Ford, Nancy Kwan, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Jane Russell, Wally Cox, Nehemiah Persoff, Mark Stevens, Max Showalter, Constance Towers, Howard St. Street Date / available through Screen Archives Entertainment / 29.95
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