No Highway in the Sky

No Highway in the Sky (1951)

EXCITEMENT and SUSPENSE 18,000 Feet Over the Atlantic!

James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor: eccentric, forgetful, but brilliant. His studies show that the aircraft being manufactured by his employer has a subtle but deadly design flaw that manifests itself only after the aircraft has flown a certain number of hours. En route to a crash site to prove his theory, Honey discovers that he is aboard a plane rapidly approaching his predicted deadline.

Date of release
1951-06-28
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (69)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Director
Henry Koster

Casting

Interesting facts

No Highway in the Sky is a 1951 black-and-white aviation drama film directed by Henry Koster from a screenplay by R. C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard, and Alec Coppel, based on the 1948 novel No Highway by Nevil Shute. The film stars James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns, Jack Hawkins, Janette Scott, Elizabeth Allan, Ronald Squire, and Jill Clifford.

Production

The first writer who worked on the script was R. C. Sherriff. The story was then assigned to producer Buddy Lighton, who hired Oscar Millard to do the screenplay. Millard said he spent six months writing the script without ever looking at a Sheriff draft. In London, the producer Buddy Lighton hired Alec Coppel to rewrite some scenes that were based at the Farnborough Aircraft Establishment.

The actor Robert Donat was originally cast in the lead role, but when the deal fell through, James Stewart was cast. This would be the second pairing of Stewart with Marlene Dietrich, the first being 1939's Destry Rides Again.

No Highway in the Sky, the film's working title, became the theatrical release title for English-speaking countries apart from the UK, where it retained the novel title No Highway. As noted in contemporary sources, filming took place in 1950 at Denham Studios, with location shooting at Blackbushe Airport in Hampshire, England, although the scene with a Gloster E.1/44 prototype was possibly staged at Boscombe Down.

In November 1950, The Hollywood Reporter claimed that Stewart underwent an emergency appendectomy in London while the film was in production.

Director Koster called it "one of my finest pictures. I thought it was a marvelous story and I had a marvelous script by very fine writers".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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