Desperate Search

This film shows the age-old problem of trying to transfer a good book to film. Too many changes were made that shouldn't. In the book Janet is only 2 and a half, not much more than a baby and still in diapers. She is not easy on the trip, but not bad either. The ex-wife is not a rival pilot but an actress who has custody of the children but doesn't really care about them. When she goes up with her ex-husband as a spotter, she falls asleep and misses seeing them. The love interest is a girl reporter. If they hadn't made these changes the movie would have been so much better!

Desperate Search isn't the best old movie out there to choose from, but if you're looking for a higher-end B movie that's exciting, you might want to check this one out. Howard Keel is a divorced dad who only gets to see his kids once a year. When he puts little Lee Aaker and Linda Lowell on an airplane to return to their mother's house, he has no idea it might be the last time he ever sees them. . .

The airplane crashes, and both nervous parents, Howard and his ex-wife Patricia Medina, are left in limbo since no one even knows where the crash occurred. Keep in mind this was made in 1952, when cell phones and GPS technology didn't exist. Also, at that time, it was a really big deal to put two young children on an airplane alone and ask the stewardess to look out for them! The good news for Howard and Patricia is that they're both airplane pilots, so they can both aid in the "desperate search" for their kids. The bad news is that Howard's current wife, Jane Greer, suspects she might lose the love of her husband.

Parts of the movie are incredibly exciting, in particular when a very mangy and hungry mountain lion makes an appearance. Parts of the movie are confusing, when Patricia Medina shows up. She looked so much like Jane Greer I continually got them mixed up and didn't know which scenes involved which actress! I enjoyed seeing Howard Keel in a dramatic non-singing role, and boy, was he curt! I lost track of how often he snapped at Jane, poor thing. Still, he looks awfully handsome in the cockpit.

"Desperate Search" is a film that lost a lot of money at the box office. I can't say for sure why this happened but wonder if perhaps word got out that the child actors (particularly the little girl) were really annoying.

Two kids are on a DC-3 airliner and the plane crashes in the winderness. Somehow the children survive but the rest of the passengers and crew do not. Judging by how darned annoying the little girl is, I wish that some others had survived instead! Regardless, the pair are stranded and a search party is out looking for them. And, it just so happens that the kids' parents both are pilots and assist in the efforts.

Much of the time the little girl, Janet, is on screen, she's either crying, whining about SOMETHING or crying for her father. I know kids would be hysterical in such a situation....at least for a little while. But her behavior was not just annoying and off-putting but it seemed over the top as well. I just can't imagine audiences back in the day liking to see this awful kid on the screen....and probably were hoping a bear or mountain lion would just eat her!

Without Janet, the film was mildly interesting. But it really hurt the story to have her in it because I can't imagine any parent WANTING to find this brat.

It always amazed me the way MGM could come up with a small budget movie - using major stars, a combination of small time directors, along with the involvement of their mainstream resident production staff. This low budget pic was a classic example - well acted by an above average, handsome cast, directed by expert low budget tradesman Joseph H Lewis and photographed by the marvellous Harold Lipstein. It would have been a treat to either watch these two work together or to know who actually designed many of the creative shots these imaginative men regularly produced together - all achieved with such little money and time! With access to all the professional resident MGM background staff available to them, their challenging tasks would have been made less a chore than when employed by lesser studios or producers (as is evident on their final two movies together)

However, it could also be imagined that these major studio benefits could have brought with them the added pressure of individual 'star' temperaments - along with additional time constraints due to other project commitments. Young Lee Aaker was a natural to end up as a child star on TV (Rin Tin Tin, etc), considering his very young age, he could command a range of rather convincing emotions. Cast here, as the young lad stranded in a life and death struggle to survive in the Canadian wilderness, he acquits himself quite well. Since years had passed between my last viewing I expected this could have dated badly and been a difficult watch, to my pleasant surprise it mostly came up looking reasonably good. Thanks again to those talent crews and stars from the past. This is recommended as a purely nostalgic time passer.

Two very young children who were on vacation visiting their father and stepmother are scheduled to be sent home by a commercial airline to their mother. Unfortunately the plane disappears and their estranged father who is a pilot immediately goes into search mode. The kids birth mother also is a pilot and she flies her own plane to the site where her children disappeared from.

The two estranged parents, both seasoned pilots, very quickly come to terms as to why they got divorced when the argument escalates regarding which is the best plan to find their missing children.

While the parents travel on alternate flight patterns searching the sky for their children in case they survived the crash, the audience sees how these two young children who miraculously survived the crash are now laid bare to the whims of the wilderness and the wild animals who hunt to kill. I felt this film had the look and feel of a family adventure film that the Walt Disney studio may have released.

The acting was good, the story line holds true to being an adventure film, and the ending which I will not give away was worth waiting for. I give this near seventy (70) year old film a decent 6 out of 10 IMDB rating and would recommend it to others as a two thumbs up film.