À l'heure zéro

I was always told that Airplane! was a take off of the Airport movies of the 70s. It might have been, but the main source for the film was Zero Hour! This film is hilarious if you're a big Airplane! fan. As I watched ZH, I was reciting the same Airplane! dialogue in my head. I've never seen two movies that are so similar. It's quite a hoot!

Dana Andrews's Zero Hour comes when former the pilot with the Canadian Air Force who lost several crews because of a decision about a mission toward the end of World War II is called upon to fly again because he's the only one on board a commercial aircraft who can.

Zero Hour is a tense thriller of a film without a second of wasted film frame in it. Andrews since World War II had come to an end has been at loose ends himself, drifting from job to job and now loosing his wife Linda Darnell and son Raymond Ferrell. On impulse after getting his wife's 'I'm leaving you' note Andrews boards a Canadian airliner in Winnipeg that is bound for Vancouver that's carrying Darnell and Ferrell. Then the passengers and both the pilot and co-pilot come down with food poisoning, courtesy of some badly prepared fish. Young Mr. Ferrell also becomes ill.

If the plot situations sound familiar that's because the film was written by Arthur Hailey who later cornered the market on these kinds of films with the successful Airport series. Story and screenplay were done by Hailey and while the film doesn't have the Ross Hunter type gloss that the Airport series had, it actually benefits because you're not stargazing among the glittering cast that all the Airport films had.

Although he's only in the last third of the film, Sterling Hayden plays one of Andrews's former Canadian Air Force pilots who knows what happened to him back in the war and who now flies for the airliner. It's Hayden's job to talk him down and give Dana on the job pilot training.

Usually the female role in these kinds of films is to patiently sit and wait while the man does his thing. That's not so in Zero Hour, Linda Darnell pitches right in and operates the plane radio right along side her estranged husband.

Andrews, Darnell, and Hayden all register well in their roles. Unusual in that time that the film has a Canadian setting though the players are mostly American. Probably helped that Arthur Hailey was British and in fact served in the RAF during World War II. I'm betting his source material for the story grew out of his experiences there.

Zero Hour is a suspenseful drama and ought not to be missed, especially if you're a fan of Hailey's Airport films.

In 2010 Zero Hour! is as funny as Airplane!, only it wasn't meant to be at the time. Kudos to TCM for showing it immediately following Airplane. Great to see Dana Andrews when young, and planes had cockpits you could just walk into. If you're a fan of Airplane, or post-war movies, this is a must see.

i hadn't seen it in decades before TCM showed them back to back last night, great job TCM.

What, the review has to be 10 lines long? Well, just picture during this black and white movie while Joey is in the cockpit the Captain saying, "Jimmy, did you ever see a grown man naked?"

This was enjoyable to watch just being a fan of 50s movies, double so being a longtime fan of Airplane!

It's funny, but despite "Zero Hour!" being an excellent and tautly written movie, I found myself laughing periodically throughout the film--and there's a good chance you will too if you watch this movie. It isn't because it's a comedy (far from it), but because the 1980s comedy "Airplane!" is basically a re-make of this 1957--but with all the insane Zucker-Abrams humor. So many times, you'll notice that "Zero Hour!" says the exact same lines and has the exact same plot you'll find in the later comedy film. It's a shame, really, as some might think the folks remade "Zero Hour!" or poked fun of it because it was a bad film--and it's among the best of the air disaster films ever made. Plus, coming back in the 1950s, it was NOT a cliché--but fresh and exciting...unlike later dreck like "Airport '75" and "Airport '79"--films that truly deserved to be parodied and mocked.

The film begins with a guy named Ted Stryker (yes, the same name as the guy Robert Hayes played in "Airplane!") but this time it's played by the ever-dependable Dana Andrews. Like in "Airplane!", he's a combat vet with PTSD and blames himself for the deaths of six pilots--but it happened in Europe, not Macho Grande! And, like in the latter film, tainted fish cause the crew and many of the passengers to become violently ill. And, like the later film, it's up to Andrews and an old WWII pilot who knows him (Sterling Hayden) to talk him through the landing process.

Despite all these similarities, the film is first-rate. Hayden and Andrews are both two of my favorite actors of the era because neither one was a "pretty boy" and they excelled at playing realistic characters--real guys who rise to the occasion when the need arises. Not macho...just real men with real problems and real grit. The script sure helped as well--it didn't seem ridiculous but managed to create wonderful tension and kept me riveted.

Overall, an excellent and often ignored film. See it yourself and see why it as well as "The High and the Mighty" are two airplane disaster movies that manage to pack a lot of entertainment more than 50 years later.

It's like déjà vu all over again. Until last night, I had never seen Zero Hour!, but I feel as if I've seen it a dozen times. I knew that some of Airplane! (the sick girl and singing nun for example) came from Airport, but I had no idea just how much was taken from Zero Hour! Airplane! is like some weird comedic remake or re-imaging of Zero Hour! - and they nailed it right down to the exclamation mark. And it's not just ideas or concepts that were taken from Zero Hour!, entire sections of dialogue were lifted and used in Airplane! I'm shocked to discover that lines like "I guess I picked the wrong week to give up smoking" weren't written especially for Airplane! The dialogue is so similar that when little Joey visits the cockpit and the captain asks if he's ever been in cockpit before, I kept waiting for him to ask "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" as he does in Airplane! Even some of the performances in Airplane! are eerily reminiscent of Zero Hour! Take Robert Stack in the role originally done by Sterling Hayden. Amazing stuff! The funny thing to me about this example, however, is that Hayden is actually more intense in the role than Stack could have dreamed.

Giving a rating to Zero Hour! is difficult. Even if you've only seen Airplane! once (and I've probably seen it a couple of dozen times over the years), it's all but impossible to keep a straight face (Who am I kidding? It's impossible not to downright laugh out loud.) when Johnny goes to make coffee or when Stryker straights sweating buckets behind the controls of the plane. It's impossible to take the melodrama of Zero Hour! seriously. So I don't know how I would rate the movie had I never seen Airplane! I would like to think I would have still enjoyed the experience and would have formed a similar opinion. But I have seen Airplane!, so I have that built in bias. In the end, because the movie kept me entertained (for whatever reason) throughout it's brief 81 minute runtime, I'm rating Zero Hour! a 7/10.