Der Tod hat Verspätung

The most entertaining aspect of this film is watching it through a 2025, American culture / air travel lens. It is a good solid drama, with strong acting, and dialog - hence 7 stars - but it's also amusing for showing us how different we are today.

In Jet Storm we have what looks to be a 24-seat jet aircraft, 2X2 seating, with one class of service: obviously first (love the name: the Atlantic Queen Service). Route: London to New York. The plane looks like a Russian Tupolev 104 in exterior shots but the cheesy model looks more like an early DeHavilland Comet. Very spacious and unusually wide interior.

The passengers? All upper middle class, upper class types, mostly British. And all, save for two or three, very polite and talky. All, of course, are in their very best dress, suit and ties for the men, even the child; day dresses for the women.

And of course there are all the stereotypes. The hysterical older woman; the cynical businessman; the aloof, glamorous aristocrat; the practical cool-headed American; the aging rock star and his girlfriend; the divorcing couple; the old dowager and her borscht belt comedian seat mate; the sleeping child; the heroic, level-headed captain; the novice stewardess; the "good girl" character. Reminds me of a John Wayne movie the High and the Mighty. Or pretty much any close-quarters disaster movie. This could have been "Airplane 1959."

The problem is that one of the passengers, an ex-mental patient, has possibly planted a bomb somewhere and one of the passengers overhears his "plan" and becomes hysterical.

From there we have a talk fest. The captain, other passengers, even a child, all try and get Mr. Bomber (a 35-year old Richard Attenborough!) calmed down and in a mood to locate and disarm the device. The captain is more psychiatrist than aviator. Attenborough is made to stay in the downstairs bar and lounge (like something you would have on an early jet age 747) while he cycles through some crazy fits and hallucinations. All the while the white-coated steward searches all the bags in the pressurized, walk-in baggage hold.

Meanwhile passengers upstairs calmly play cards. Given the need to keep the passengers in a good mood, despite possible death at any minute, the stewardess starts serving unlimited, free champagne. Miss Good Girl helpfully suggests the bubbly be laced with some of her feel good pills (which knocks out an especially troublesome woman, who never returns to the movie). So British. So passive aggressive.

Fast forward to 2025. Can you imagine this in an American aircraft? Attenborough's character would have been hit on the head with a metal coffee pot then taped in to a seat, with hands bound with cable ties. The passengers - many in gym attire, wife beaters, and flip flops - would be complaining about missed connections, and no meal service. The FA would be some tired old 60-year old harridan running up and down the aisle barking orders. The plane would have dived from 40,000 feet to 10,000 and diverted to Iceland causing garbage to be strewn about the cabin. Passengers would be snarling about missed connections, and texting lawyers who are all on social media trolling for business. Lots of iPhone video action too.

But here in the transatlantic skies of 1959 we have polite conversation among the nicer passengers and games of gin and poker. No one gets mussed or wrinkled even after a mild tussle or two. Aristo woman even thumbs through her fashion magazine.

Ahh for the good old days of aircraft disasters.

Following the success of 'The League of Gentlemen', Dickie Attenborough began mobilising his own films and appeared in other films to raise the money to continue making his own (in the same way that Laurence Olivier was acting in films in order to finance his own stage productions at the National Theatre). This film is one of them.

"Kidboots" critique above informs us adequately of the basic plot.However I would like to concentrate more on the actors and their performances.This is rather a cloistrophobic production since 95% of the action is filmed at Shepperton studios in a mock-up of the interior of a passenger jet airliner in 1959.It was rather sad to note the passing of so many famous actors among them, Stanley Baker, Hermione Baddeley and Harry Seacombe teamed with Dame Sybil Thorndyke.Regarding the latter, I had only seen her playing the mother of the Rev. Marston in "Gone To Earth" (1949); but here she shows her acting versatility by adopting a rather humorous role, while Harry Seacombe couldn't resist the odd "Goon" like facial gesture.

It was surprising to see the obviously suited Canadian married couple of Barbara Kelly (who I had only ever seen in the 1950s TV panel game "What's My Line") and her husband Bernard Braden (tv's "The Braden Beat"), acting together as a divorcing couple.Stanley Baker keeps impeccably calm as the airliner captain and there is a rather touching romance between Virginia Maskell and the American co-pilot.The "Brummy" actor who plays the hit-and run driver played a very similar role in "The Night My Number Came Up" with Sir Michael Redgrave.I had never seen Marty Wilde in a film acting role, of course playing a pop star, and noted he composed the opening popular theme music.

With all the actors competing for dialogue, no one should be singled out as that would be unfair since they all give professional performances.The "Brummy" hit-and run driver met an end like Gert Frobe's "Auric Goldfinger".

This is basically a disaster movie prototype, from before there were such things. It wasn't the first film made about a flight in peril, but it was one of the first to feature a jet aircraft. This film is chock-a-block with fine acting talent and the claustrophic confines of the aircraft make for a good 'plot pressure cooker' that eventually brings things to a head.

Actually the confines of the aircraft are not anywhere near as small as they ought to be; the aircraft cabin set is eerily quiet, and incredibly spacious, having eight foot plus ceilings, wide seats and a huge gangway. There is a downstairs lounge too, with a second row of windows (unseen in any external shots), a bar and a luggage hold that you can wander around in. Jet aircraft were certainly not like that at the time and in fact never really have been. The camera work has just a hint of sway to it; enough to suggest the aircraft is actually flying, but without making you feel seasick watching it. The aircraft used in the film vary; in long shots prior to and during take-off a medium-haul Aeroflot Tu104A (CCCP-42390) is used, however they are seen boarding G-AOYM (actually a BEA Vickers Viscount, with no jet engine exhaust in the trailing edge of the wing root of course) and announce themselves using a different call sign (G-AJOR) to the control tower. A Tu104-esque model is used too, which is also marked G-AJOR. Near the end of the film a completely different aircraft, a turboprop of some kind, is seen in twilight.

The film was released in 1959; the only passenger jet aircraft flying for most of the previous three years had been the Tu104. Both the Boeing 707 and the DH Comet IV had been flying transatlantic since October 1958, but portraying either type in a disaster movie would have been a political hot potato; effectively the US and UK aircraft industries were busy duking it out for the long haul jet aircraft market. Choosing the Tu104 to represent a fictional type flying the equally fictional 'Atlantic Queen' service was a neat way out of any controversy that might so be caused.

It is a pretty good film, this, all told; an interesting period piece, a proto-disaster movie, a hothouse of acting talent.

This has to be a key progenitor to the modern disaster movie well before the famous Airport series for instance. There are scenes in this repeated with great hilarity in Airplane! too. But here the style is of a serious drama and thriller, as opposed to a comedy, except for the inevitable inadvertent howlers for the contemporary viewer. There's a preponderance of excellent actors at all levels with quite a lot to offer in the now standard character-development phase of the plot -- there are ongoing themes on typical preoccupations of the era like social class prejudice, the destruction of world wars and fears of nuclear apocalypse, and lots on the burgeoning sexual revolution to name a few. With stuff like this the real action and indeed the plausibility of the plot becomes strangely irrelevant. But if one cares to pick the latter apart it's not hard to see wobbly elements like the odd two-level areoplane in the studio when the external shots are of a re-fitted Tuplov Soviet nuclear bomber with just a single deck fuselage. The addition of the "lounge deck" is important in the story, and anyway adds to the feel of specialness and luxury that flight in the 1960s was synonymous with. So, for the excellent drama, and the bits of cultural history alone I give this 9/10 with just a point loss on the plausibility front. Attenborough is excellent as the creepy antagonist.