Airliner crashes near Los Angeles due to unusual string of coincidences. Stewardess, who is sole survivor, joins airline executives in discovering the causes of the crash.
Rod Taylor, Nancy Kwan, Glenn Ford, Suzanne Pleshette
Directed by Ralph Nelson
Music composed by Jerry Goldsmith
106 minutes / B&W
Language: English
NTSC
Audio: Mono
16 x 9 Anamorphic Widescreen
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Run time: 106 minutes / B&W
Special Features: Isolated Music & Effects Track and Original Theatrical Trailer
DVD excerpt notes by Julie Kirgo:
Ernest K. Gann spent the first part of his adult life living out a series of celestial adventures—as a barnstormer, a military aviator, and an airline pilot in the early days of commercial flying—and the next part writing about them, to enormous critical and popular acclaim. Books like Island in the Sky, Blaze of Noon, The High and the Mighty, and Fate Is the Hunter—and the films they inspired—were blessed with both nuts-and-bolts verisimilitude (flyers often cite Gann’s work as “the most realistic” in all aviation literature) and an evocative sense of the romance of the skies (just check out those titles). Gann could craft an adventure story with the best of them, but what gave his work its very particular piquance was its sharp focus on human behavior in extremis—and on the sheer professionalism that is sometimes the only thing that can pull us out of nosedives, whether literal or figurative.
Fate Is the Hunter (1964), the movie version of Gann’s 1961 best-seller, certainly shares this vision of professionalism as the last saving grace, but apart from its title, that’s about all the film has in common with the book. Gann’s novelistic memoir was, perhaps, too anecdotal for easy screen adaptation; it even defeated him. An experienced screenwriter who already had adapted several of his books for the movies, he attempted a number of drafts for Fate before throwing in the towel, crankily refusing screen credit for good measure (the final screenplay is credited to Harold Medford). Later, he would come to regret this decision, if only financially: in his autobiography, A Hostage to Fortune, Gann would write, “I deprived myself of the TV residuals, a medium in which the film played interminably.”
In a certain sense, one can see what might have irked this poet of the ether about Fate Is the Hunter. Rather than lingering among the clouds, the film, within its first few moments, sends us hurtling earthwards with the depiction of a truly horrifying plane crash. Until its nerve-wracking climax—a minute-by-minute recreation of the fatal flight—the film is a straightforward, boots-on-the-ground detailing of a dogged investigator’s attempt to find an explanation for the crash. No fireworks, no poetry, no romance: just solid inquiry, and terrific story-telling.
Fate’s central characters operate in more or less the same deliberately un-idealized universe. The investigator (Glenn Ford, with his kid’s face and a voice that seems always on the verge of breaking) is described by a colleague as “one of the best-built machines [I] ever knew.” The pilot (Rod Taylor, clearly having a whale of a time) is depicted in flashback as an attractive, fatalistic scapegrace—and superb flyer—whose apparently careless mantra is, “If your number’s up, why fight it, and if it’s not, why worry?” The sole survivor of the crash is a stewardess (Suzanne Pleshette) who can’t stop asking, “Why me?”; Taylor’s girlfriend (Nancy Kwan) is a marine biologist burying herself in the lab as a refuge from her strangely philosophical grief; the airline’s head of engineering (Nehemiah Persoff, in a performance bursting with barely suppressed ambition) is torn between wanting to find a solution and defending his personal bailiwick. What unites this disparate crew is their passionate professionalism: their often single-minded desire to get the job—whatever the job may be—done with efficiency, dispatch, and honor.
