The Crowded Sky

The Crowded Sky (1960)

The most fascinating people the gods of chance ever swept up into high adventure!

When Navy pilot Dale Heath takes off, he doesn't expect his navigational equipment to fail and must adapt when it goes out along with his radio. Heading straight for a commercial jet piloted by Dick Barnett, whose plane is full of passengers, Heath can't tell which way to turn in order to avoid a catastrophe.

Date of release
1960-09-02
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Action, Drama, Romance
Director
Joseph Pevney

Casting

Interesting facts

The Crowded Sky is a 1960 American Technicolor drama film distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Michael Garrison, directed by Joseph Pevney and starring Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. The film is based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Hank Searls.

Production

Film rights to the novel The Crowded Sky, written by a former U.S. Navy flyer, were sold before the book was published. The screenplay employs the frequent device of characters thinking aloud, as screenwriter Charles Schnee felt that audiences required more subtlety in characterization, which could be achieved with the additional dialogue.

The Crowded Sky was the first film role in more than a year for Dana Andrews, who had been appearing on Broadway in the play Two for the Seesaw. Andrews described the film "as a kind of Bridge of San Luis Rey of the air."

In order to prepare for his role, Zimbalist trained for 20 hours in a jet flight simulator to familiarize himself with the controls that his character would use. Troy Donahue's role was a departure from the usual teenage films that he had made for Warner Bros. Pictures. The main theme music from A Summer Place, Donahue's preceding film, appears in the soundtrack. Principal photography began in mid-October and concluded in mid-November 1959.

Even though the Dick Barnett character mentions that he knows how to fly DC-7s, the actual plane used in the film appears to be a Douglas DC-6. The DC-7 has four-blade propellers but the DC-6's propellers have only three blades.

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

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