Seven Were Saved

A plane bound for Manilla is skyjacked by Richard Loo and crashes several hundred miles off course. While the survivors squabble and struggle in a life raft, the Sea Air Rescue Service searches for them.

If that half-sounds like Hitchcock's LIFEBOAT with Catherine Craig sitting in for Tallulah Bankhead, that's how it struck me. It's produced by William Pine and William Thomas, and the Dollar Bills never saw a plot they didn't like -- even if the Hitchcock original was one of his few financial failures. Add in the rescue effort, and have William Pine make one of his occasional directorial appearance, and profits would flow. A few Hero Poses of Richard Denning -- doing a Joel McCrea impersonation -- with Miss Craig looking up at him adoringly, and Bob's your uncle.

Any subtext is buried way down, and the bravura composition work that Hitch and his crew accomplished is missing, but the Dollar Bills knew how to get a bang for their buck. It doesn't aspire to be a great picture, but it accomplishes its modest goals of filling 75 minutes entertainingly.

This film is a bad combination of Lifeboat and a hundred other films. The acting is pretty bad, and the cinematography reminded me of Stan and Ollie in the French Foreign Legion in Flying Deuces. Other than that the film is almost watchable. Actually, its not watchable; don't waste your time.

There is absolutely nothing fancy about this. It's a simple story with a simple set. While escorting an accused Japanese war criminal to his trial in Manila, an American air force plane crashes in the South China Sea, and the passengers and crew (including the Japanese war criminal) have to find a way to work together to survive until they're rescued. Along the way they face the sorts of things you would expect in the circumstances - a lack of food and water, injuries from the crash, tension around the presence of Colonel Yamura, shark attacks, etc. Almost the entire movie is set on the life raft, so the composite cast had to work together pretty well in order to make this interesting - and for the most part they succeeded. Catherine Craig and Richard Denning had the most significant parts as the two on the raft who seemed to be the most in control, and they did well with their parts. The basic bit of suspense in the movie is which seven are going to survive. The title tells us that there will be seven, but there are eight survivors of the crash, so it's a bit of a guessing game as to which one isn't going to make it.

This seems to be a bit of a tribute to American air and sea rescue forces, and it's interesting enough to see how they handle the rescue once the raft is discovered. It's a definite B-Movie, but it's not a bad one. (6/10)

Seven Were Saved was another project from the 'Dollar Bills' of Paramount, that B unit production company that churned out a lot of the second features for Paramount, stuff that got 2nd billed to main features that Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Alan Ladd when they were being shown. It's a story of air/sea rescue post World War II and had they stuck to that it might have been a decent film. William Pine and William Thomas were the 'dollar bills'.

Instead we got a cut rate version of Lifeboat when an army transport plane went down and several people were stranded in a rubber lifeboat the plane carried. How it happened was a bit on the bizarre side also. Richard Loo who was of Chinese background played many a cruel Japanese officer during and after World War II. He's in custody going to trial for war crimes in the Phillipines, but breaks free and tries to hijack the plane. It goes sufficiently off course to make tracking most difficult.

Richard Denning is piloting the plane and Catherine Craig otherwise known as Mrs. Robert Preston is an army nurse is one of the passengers and married to Russell Hayden. Hayden is one of the air/sea rescue pilots who's temporarily out of action and he breaks regulation to aid in the rescue.

I won't go into the melodrama in the lifeboat, you saw it all before and better with Alfred Hitchcock.

"Seven Were Saved" takes place at the end of World War II. An Army Air Force plane is flying to the Philippines with several military passengers on board. One is a nurse and one is a POW Japanese colonel. He is under guard and going to the Philippines to stand trial there for war crimes. He throws hot coffee on the solder guarding him and grabs the pistol from his holster. After shooting the officer escort, knocking out the navigator and shooting the copilot, he hijacks the plane. He sends it off in a different direction, apparently intending to take his chances on a small island somewhere. But when the plane runs out of gas and crashes in the sea, eight people make it to the raft.

The colonel has lost the pistol and now all have to try to stay alive until rescued But they have flown a couple hundred miles off their course. So, the sea rescue planes sent out don't find them anywhere. After more than a week, the head of the rescue operations decides to stop the searches. But, one pilot, who had been sick and grounded, decided to make one last sweep outside their known route. The nurse onboard was his sweetheart. Well, one can guess how this will come out. Before they are ultimately rescued, one of the men who had been ill disappears over the side during the night.

This isn't a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1944 "Lifeboat," but that film no doubt influenced Paramount on this film. The prologue on the screen dedicates the film "to the men of the AAF Air Sea Rescue Service, who risk their lives daily that others may live."

Instead of trying to be so sociable and humorous, the Sergeant should have been more alert guarding the prisoner. After he tells the nurse that he would have a cup of coffee and it would be okay for the prisoner to have a cup, he says, "You know, I really can't stand coffee. I just take it to cure my insomnia."

This is a B-level film with no prominent actors among the cast. But, they all give good performances.