Desperate Journey

Desperate Journey (1942)

Man alive, Just picture this excitement!

A British bomber crew, including Australian and American, is shot down over Germany during a bombing run. The five make their way across a perilous Germany, intent on reaching the UK with the war secrets they have learned, battling Nazis along the way.

Date of release
1942-09-26
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (34)
Runtime
1h 47m
Genres
War, Adventure, Action
Director
Raoul Walsh

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $4M
  • Budget: $1.2M
  • Earned 3.3× its budget
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Desperate Journey is a 1942 American World War II action and aviation film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan. The supporting cast includes Raymond Massey, Alan Hale Sr., and Arthur Kennedy. The melodramatic film featured a group of downed Allied airmen making their way out of the Third Reich, often with their fists.

Production

The film was originally known as Forced Landing. It was written by Arthur Horman, who had done some uncredited work on the script for 49th Parallel (1941), notably scenes with Raymond Massey and Laurence Olivier. While there, he came up with the idea for a film about six English pilots escaping through occupied Europe, the reverse situation of 49th Parallel.

Vincent Sherman was considered to direct; he wrote to Hal Wallis saying he loved the central concept and thought the basic idea was good, but "its greatest weakness was it didn't have a story...once the men make their first escape you could very easily leave out every following sequence and simply go to the end without losing anything in so far as story is concerned".

Sherman was replaced as director by Raoul Walsh and the title was changed to Desperate Journey. Errol Flynn was meant to make Gentleman Jim for the studio, but they postponed it so he could star in Desperate Journey, instead. The movie was rushed into production to take advantage of America's recent entry into the war, which meant the problems in the script identified by Sherman were never really fixed.

Prior to and during filming, uncredited work on the script was done by Julius and Philip Epstein. Director Raoul Walsh said, "they have added a little zip to the script" and asked for them to keep working on it from a memo from Raoul Walsh to Hal Wallis dated February 13, 1942.

Principal photography on Desperate Journey took place from late January to early April 1942, filmed at the Warner Bros. studio, Lake Sherwood (Point Mugu and Point Hueneme) and Warner Ranch, Calabasas, California, backlots. Flying scenes were shot at the Van Nuys Metropolitan Airport. Warner Bros.

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

Recommended