Customer Reviews

No Highway in the Sky

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jimmy Stewart is the original absent-minded professor in this fine film.

He plays an engineer who is convinced that the tail section of the passenger plane he is on will fall off after so many hours of flight. He's not comfortable around people, and focuses his life on facts and figures. So much so, he has trouble remembering the most basic of details that are not related to his work.

A fine perfomance by Jimmy and the entire cast, and the aircraft design is interesting to say the least.

Marlene Dietrich does a turn in a supporting role, Glynis Johns plays an airline stewardess who looks after the eccentric Stewart, and Janette Scott is wonderful as Stewart's young, lonely daughter.

Although the film was made under the auspices of 20th Century Fox, the film has the feel of an Ealing Studios production.

It's a real treat for fans of the Ealing type of film, and in fact, a treat for anyone who likes good film.

This is a faithful film adaptation of a very good Nevil Shute novel. (Mr. Shute was the author of "On the Beach" and "A Town Like Alice," among other fine books.) This is a story of good people, simply trying to live their lives and often finding sanity and - dare I say it? - salvation through hard work, a recurring theme in Mr. Shute's writings. The central character is Theodore Honey, a boffin at the Royal Aircraft Establishment research facility shortly after World War II investigating the rather peculiar - for the time - theory that metal fatigue might cause catastrophic failure in aircraft structures during flight.

Stewart's Honey is certainly a boffin, in the traditional British sense. A brilliant but introverted scientist, almost completely wrapped up in his work. His only real contact with society is through his daughter, who he is raising alone since his wife was killed by a German bomb during World War II. The rest of society is a complete puzzlement to Honey, as is Honey to the rest of society. He is only just barely intelligible to the scientific types he works with. Stewart plays the bumbling Honey to the hilt, with a messy house and few social graces. His daughter is much loved, but the audience can see she is starving for more from life than Honey can even imagine her needing. Stewart - and I am not a Stewart fan - makes Honey both believable and likeable, and even potentially lovable. (Part of his success is due to the fact that Honey's foibles as shown in the movie really are funny without being insulting to the character.)

So where does the story line come in? Well, Honey's ideas about metal fatigue is actually very important, because he is testing them on the tail section of a new British airliner, the Reindeer, which is already in service flying between Britain and North America. According to Honey's calculations, tail assemblies are going to start falling off these planes after about 1400 hours of flight time. Luckily, the planes are so new in service that this deadline does not appear to be an immediate problem. Except, not so luckily, a few of the early production models used for testing are approaching the fateful 1400 hour limit, and one has already passed that limit and crashed in Canada, with the cause of the crash attributed to "pilot error."

Quite reasonably, Honey is sent across the Atlantic to investigate the Canadian crash. It turns out that he flies off in - what else? - a Reindeer. A Reindeer which he discovers after take off has over 1400 hours of airtime. Suddenly Honey the boffin is thrust into the real world with a vengeance. His attempts to warn the flight crew of the potential danger fail, and his introverted personality encourages him to withdraw from the fight. Yet at the same time his basic humanity draws him to warn and to try saving both a famous movie actress on the same flight, well played by Marlene Dietrich, and a caring stewardess played by Glynis Johns. Honey's honest attraction to these very different people forces him out of his scientific shell to take drastic action to save them and the other passengers and crew.

Within the story, we see character exposition and character development not only from Honey, but also by Dietrich and Jones. These later developments are both touching and fully believable. Especially poignant is Dietrich's character, who is drawn to Honey's honesty and commitment, but is literally beaten to the door by the stewardess played by Jones. The Dietrich character's sadness at what she believes is her own rather pointless celluloid life, and her sorrow at losing Honey are truly moving.

Strong supporting roles are provided by Jack Hawkins (last seen helping to blow up that Damn bridge on over the River Kwai) and several other fine actors, especially the young Janette Scott who plays Honey's 12 year old daughter Elspeth. Scott's role as a young girl who loves and worships her father, and yet is paying a price for her constrained family life she can not even understand is beautifully done. (One of the best scenes of the movie is where Dietrich's character, about to leave the world of the Honey's for good, asks the stewardess, who is there to stay, to "tell [Elspeth] that she is pretty.")

I know it may seem that I have given a lot away in this review. But be assured, there is a lot more to this movie that I haven't even touched on. For just one example, where else are you going to see real flight footage of the Meteor, the first British jet fighter? And for another example, just how Honey finally manages to save the lives of everyone on that apparently doomed Reindeer is fun, exciting, and empowering, to Honey and to other characters as well.

Anyway, If you like people, you will like this movie.

1951's "No Highway In The Sky" stars James Stewart as "Theodore Honey", a scientist working on an unusual project -- attempting to prove that a new fleet of commercial airplanes is about to experience a catastrophic failure of its tail assembly. Is Mr. Honey just a crackpot, as most people around him seem to think? Or is he on to something? Watch this excellent black-and-white drama and see for yourself.

Jimmy Stewart is superb in his role here as a nervous and eccentric engineer/scientist. So what else is new, right? Jimmy's always great in my book. One of Stewart's co-stars in this movie is Marlene Dietrich. This, IMO, is kind of an odd part for Dietrich, and a rather small one. She's not really part of the main plot at all, and could have easily been written out of the script without much difficulty if needed. But I'm glad she wasn't. She makes the most of her small part here (as a compassionate movie star named "Monica Teasdale"), who is flying on board the same airplane with Mr. Honey -- an airplane that Mr. Honey is convinced is going to break apart at any moment and plunge to a watery grave. Dietrich plays off of Stewart's foibles nicely in their scenes together.

Glynis Johns also co-stars in "No Highway" (that shorter title was the original name of the film; the "...In The Sky" portion of the title was added for U.S. prints). Johns, like Dietrich, portrays a very sympathetic character in the picture, who is very tender and understanding toward Mr. Honey's fears and suspicions about the new "Reindeer" fleet of aircraft. Johns' character is a stewardess who befriends Stewart/Honey and his young daughter (who is played with feeling by 12-year-old Janette Scott).

"No Highway In The Sky" was directed by Henry Koster, who also directed James Stewart in "Harvey" just one year earlier.

This VHS tape was issued by FOX Video in 1995 (under 20th Century Fox's "Studio Classic" banner), and sports a feature running time of 98 minutes. The Original Theatrical Trailer for the film is also included, which serves as a welcome bonus on this video -- the type of extra feature not often found on VHS versions of home-video movie releases. The Trailer, which runs for 2:05, is located at the beginning of this videotape.

The movie is presented here in its original "Full-Frame/Full-Screen" ratio; the audio is "Hi-Fi Stereo" (re-mixed from the film's original Mono source).

"No Highway In The Sky" is one of the lesser-known Stewart or Dietrich flicks -- but one that certainly deserves to be seen.

At the very summit of his skills, no role was apparently beyond James Stewart's powers and he branched out again in this intriguing movie which predicted with unnerving accuracy the coming disaster of the ill-fated British Comet jetliner. Stewart is a mathmetician on the trail of unpredictiable metal fatigue in commercial aircraft, exactly the failure that brought down several Comets and killed hundreds a couple years later. In this picture, Stewart manages to head off another calamity when his conscience is inflamed by three women: Janette Scott, Glynis Johns, and Marlene Dietrich. The film was based on a novel by Nevil Shute, and his prescience about the difficult transition from propeller to jet aircraft that lay ahead was pretty uncanny. Henry Koster had also directed Stewart in "Harvey" and does a marvelous job with a mostly British cast here as well.

On November 12, 2002, flight 587 took off from New York's JFK airport, only to crash in Belle Harbor, Queens. The tail had separated from the aircraft.

"No Highway in the Sky" predates this by about 50 years. It is about an aircraft designer who discovers a design flaw in a passenger plane that causes the tail section to suddenly tear away after a certain number of flight hours. The trouble is, no one believes him.

This is one of the best Jimmy Stewart movies. It has a great cast, including Marlene Dietrich and Glynnis Johns. It has a beautiful subplot, of a widowed scientist trying to raise his daughter without a clue. It'll make you laugh, cry, and cheer.

I wish it were available on DVD.

Another Nevil Shute novel made into a movie. Shute's main character here is Mr Honey a "boffin"! There is something magical about the way James Stewart brings a character to life and his Mr. Honey is a charming, lovable, believable boffin. The cast, including Jack Hawkins, Glynis Johns, Marlene Dietrich,Kenneth Moore, Wilfrid Hyde-White and too many other to name here have worked together bringing the novel "No Highway" beautifully to the screen. This movie was made a long time ago (1951) in wonderful black & white, but it is not, or ever will be old! The subject of the story is still one of the main problems facing today's aircraft manufacturers.

This work really deserves 3.5-4 stars, not just the meager 3 awarded it by the respected Martin & Porter. It is one of the better, more humanly and socially interesting, and philosophically more important of the 83 films in which Stewart acted, although its aeronautical engineering focus, and British understatement or civility, must understandably account for its neglect by the public and presumably by critics. Stewart's acting style or personality in this film was unusual even for him, or in the extreme to which it took one of his many canonical roles and manners, say that of a charming eccentric (but who in this case is also a brilliant scientist). The film is ultimately a celebration of conscience and integrity, differentiated from what at first appears to be merely idiosyncrasy or dangerous insanity.

This is a personal favorite. The author of the book, Nevil Shute, was an aircraft engineer and worked on the Airship R100. He also worked with the famous inventor Barnes Wallis. These facts give the film some credibility in regards to metallergy. Reading the book might give insight into the accuracy the film-maker put into the scientific statements Stewart's character spoke.

Regardless of the details it is still a good picture.

This and Field of Dreams are my two favorite films of all time. Feel good movies without a bit of smaltz. Hope it comes to DVD soon.

One of those "hidden gem" films that slips by the viewer occasionally,only to be unearthed at a later date.If there is such a thing as a stereotypical James Stewart, this film fills the bill. Stewart plays an eccentric,genius/idiot who bumbles along daily, trying to convince the world that he's scientifically correct and that doom awaits all those flying over 1440 net hours in a Reindeer airplane. Superb body language compliments the usual Stewart stutter.A splendid supporting cast augments the film"s reality. Once you've seen the film, you're apt to be drawn back to it time and again. Enjoy!