No Highway
Tags: suspenseful

Plot synopsis:
Mr. Dennis Scott (Jack Hawkins) shows up for his first day of work as Chief of Metallurgy at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, England, UK, and reports to Sir John (Ronald Squire), the Director. Sir John immediately hands Scott over to Major Pearl (Maurice Denham), aka "The Pearl of Great Price," for a tour of the testing facilities. The various tests that the RAE scientists have set up fascinate Scott, especially the last one, a prolonged "vibration test" of the double-elevator tail group of the RAE's latest creation, the Reindeer airliner, of which several hundred were delivered recently to the Trans-Atlantic Aircraft Corporation. Major Pearl cannot make himself heard over the tremendous noise, so he shuts down the test, thus provoking the lone scientist, Theodore Honey (James Stewart), to protest that the test must continue. Honey is very brusque and not very sociable at all, but Pearl explains to Scott that the RAE has had him since his days as a Rhodes Scholar from the USA and consider him quite valuable.Scott asks Honey the point of his exercise, and Honey says simply, "I expect the tail to fall off." Scott is not satisfied with that and offers to give Honey a lift to his home so that he can have an opportunity to press Honey further. Honey's theory is that the repeated vibration of thousands of flying hours must produce energy, and since that energy is not released as heat or in any other form, the metal itself must absorb it and eventually fail, at 1440 flying hours. Honey is quite oblivious to the consideration that people's lives might ride on his theory and calculations, and protests that as a scientist he cannot afford to concern himself with people.Honey's thoroughly eccentric attitudes carry forward into his home life. His wife is dead, but his daughter Elspeth (Janette Scott) remains, and he has been home-schooling her with a regimen of near-constant study. Scott finds Elspeth pleasant enough, but worries that she is even less socially adept even than Honey, difficult as Scott finds that to imagine.The next morning, Scott hoists a pint with an old friend of his, a test pilot named Bill Penworthy (David Hutcheson). The two men talk of a mutual friend, Harry Ward, a pilot for TAAC, who died in a crash in Labrador under mysterious circumstances. Penworthy voices contempt for a system that blithely attributes a mysterious airline crash to "pilot's error" just because the pilot is dead and thus unable to defend his reputation. The circumstances of the crash were these: the aircraft abruptly lost altitude, as if the pilot had taken a crash dive, something that Ward would never have done. But what makes Scott take Penworthy's story even more seriously is the make of the aircraft: a Reindeer.Scott asks Sir John's secretary, a man named Johnson (Hugh Cross), to show him every available photograph of the wreckage of Waring's plane. Johnson alarms him with two revelations: the aircraft had 1407 hours on it when it went down, and the tail group was never found. That, of course, was the very thing that Honey was testing. Could the tail have broken off from metal fatigue, as Honey had predicted and was even now testing out?Scott brings his suspicions to Sir John, who agrees to place Honey's vibration test on a round-the-clock schedule (instead of 8 hours a day) and to send Honey to Laborador on the next available flight to find the tail group and inspect it personally. And that is how Honey finds himself boarding TAAC Flight 26 to Montreal by way of Gander, Newfoundland. But what he does not realize until he is in the air is that his aircraft is a Reindeer.Aboard the flight, Stewardess Marjorie Corder (Glynnis Johns) at first notices a very nervous man who obviously has never been in an airliner before. Then Copilot Sam Dobson (Kenneth More) dumbfounds her with the announcement that they have an aeronautical scientist on board, and points him out as that very passenger (who is, of course, Honey). Marjorie rushes to apologize to Honey, who says that this is indeed his first-ever airline fight. Then she informs him that Captain Samuelson (Niall MacGinnis) has offered to give him a VIP tour of the cockpit, and in the process informs him that he is aboard a Reindeer. That is the first thing that really worries Honey. Then, when he takes the cockpit tour, he receives news that shocks him to the core: that the aircraft already has 1422 flying hours on it, more than the aircraft that crashed in Labrador! Now he tries to press Samuelson to turn back, because if he does not, the tail will break off and everyone on board will die. Samuelson is skeptical, of course, but agrees to radio London for instructions, and to feather his inboard engines to reduce the vibratory load.Back in the passenger cabin, Honey takes time to inspect the men's lavatory, which shares a bulkhead with the galley, a bulkhead bolted to the floor. Thus determining that that is the safest place in the aircraft in the event of a crash, he breathlessly introduces himself to a prominent female passenger, a movie star named Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich). At the first sight of this strange little man with his whacked out theory, she presses the call button at her seat, and Marjorie shows up to usher Honey back to his seat. He cooperates, but not before he repeats to her exactly what he tried to tell Monica about the best place to ride out a crash. Marjorie goes to apologize to Monica, and then tries to explain what Honey was trying to tell her. Monica now becomes curious, especially when the two inboard engines shut off, indicating that the captain really did take Honey seriously. Whereupon Monica insists on sitting with Honey and getting him to explain everything to her. Subsequently, Monica and Honey sit out the rest of the flight in the galley, where they make small talk that suddenly doesn't seem so small.Samuelson receives no orders except to act at his own discretion. Because he is past the point of no return (the halfway point), he flies on, but requests clearance for an immediate, straight-in landing. He lands safely enough, and then orders a complete nose-to-tail inspection. But he next orders Marjorie to confine Honey to a private room in the Gander terminal, and not to allow him back aboard for the next leg of the flight.Honey is not convinced that the safe landing proved him wrong, and believes that the next flight that that aircraft makes will be its last. So when the captain asks everyone to come back aboard, Honey jostles his way aboard the aircraft and pushes into the cockpit, where Samuelson tells him to get off and stay off. Whereupon Honey spots the landing-gear lever and pulls it, thus retracting the landing gear while the aircraft is on the ground. That, of course, makes the aircraft unflyable.Monica, astounded, makes her way to Honey and praises him for the courage of his convictions, and announces that the experience is worth any delay he might have caused. Marjorie, for her part, is simply worried about the consequences to Honey of his actions.Sir John is furious, as much with the reaction of the press, not to mention the temperamental Sir David Moon (Hugh Wakefield), President of TAAC, as with Honey's actions, though Johnson finds the whole incident very funny. Sir John must also send an RAF pilot to fetch Honey back to Farnborough, as no TAAC pilot will dare have him as a passenger, and also send another investigator to Laborador to finish what Honey had set out to do there. In the middle of the excitement, Monica introduces herself to Sir John and tells him frankly that she was quite afraid that Honey's bosses would throw him to the wolves, a thing she did not wish to see happen.Honey returns to his laboratory and finds that others are running his experiment without him. He protests to Sir John, who informs him that he has to undergo psychological testing, while the vibration test will now run around the clock, either to failure or to 1440 hours. Honey then returns home to find that Marjorie has made it to his home ahead of him and has settled in as his housekeeper. Honey is very much worried about having done such a "crazy" thing, something that violates every rule of an ordered life that he had set for himself, but also knows that, given the same or similar circumstances, he would do the same thing again. Honey then expresses concern for the gossip that Marjorie's presence in his flat might cause, so she makes a quick trip to retrieve her nurse's uniform. (In that era, all flight attendants were recruited from among the ranks of registered nurses.)And so, when Monica comes to pay a call on Honey, she finds Marjorie there. Monica and Marjorie have a long chat, at the end of which Monica decides that she is not cut out to mix into Honey's life (a thing that no one should go into only halfway), and will return to making motion pictures to make sure that her life will have the meaning that Honey said it had.The experiment continues, but at 1440 hours the tail group does not fail. Honey returns home and confesses his failure to Marjorie, who tells him that if he really believes in his theory, he must defend it. He also has a heart-to-heart with Elspeth, who for the first time in her young life is seriously upset about her lack of any sort of socialization.Honey faces dismissal from the Establishment, and TAAC will not take its Reindeers out of service on account of Honey's theories. Whereupon Honey gives notice to the Establishment and threatens to wreck any Reindeer that is about to take off, and shouldn't, until people are simply afraid to fly on such aircraft.Honey returns to his flat and confesses that he has lost everything to Marjorie. Marjorie comforts him as best she can, and then announces that she will marry him, because he is so like a little boy who needs someone to look after him (especially after she discovers seven months' worth of payroll cheques that he has never deposited!).Back at the meeting, Sir John and Scott discuss Honey's threat, when Johnson rushes to Sir John with an urgent message: the investigator who had gone to Laborador in Honey's place has found the tail group, and that it had indeed failed from metal fatigue! Then Sir David Moon delivers his own breathless report: when the Reindeer that Honey had wrecked had undergone its repair, and taken off for a simple airworthiness test, had made a perfect landing, only to have the tail fall off as it taxied to the hangar!Scott and Sir John rush breathlessly to Honey's section of the laboratory to tell him that two reports from Gander and Labrador bear him out completely. Honey, with Marjorie by his side, acknowledges the reports but is still wondering why his own experiment failed. Sir John again tells him that the reports have vindicated him, when at that very instant the tail group breaks in half and crashes to the floor. As Sir John and Scott congratulate one another, Honey notices a swinging thermometer, and realizes at once that his experiment had not failed, but simply took longer than he calculated because he ran it in a heated shed, and that his own airliner had made it to Gander because it had piled up its flying hours serving a tropical route.

Review: The story revolves around a new advanced design commercial airliner called "Reindeer", in service in the UK and an aeronautical engineer (portrayed by Stewart) who suspects that the aircraft might have a design problem that could result in a structural failure of the vertical tailplane from metal fatigue...
After one of the airliners is lost in a crash (and the tailplane is not among the wreckage) Stewart's character (Theodore Honey) begins testing of a production tailplane in a large research lab, vibrating it to see if, after a carefully calculated number of hours of vibration, the tailplane will suffer a structural failure.
His theories about the proposed failure of the lab test subject tailplane assembly after a select number of hours of vibration are reinforced by a similar number of flight hours on the first airliner that was lost, which confirms his convictions that the crash was indeed the results of a structural failure brought on by metal fatigue.The problem is that Mr Honey is a bit of a recluse and eccentric, a widower and single parent, and considered a bit of an odd duck by his contemporaries.
Honey, upon realizing that the airplane has the "required" flight time on the clocks to be in danger, embarks upon a quest to do something about it as only an eccentric genius can, and the story takes off from there (again, no pun).The combination of a laid-back American actor like James Stewart and a somewhat abrupt British cast tends to accentuate Stewart's Theodore Honey, a normally reserved but very absorbed engineer caught up in his work, surrounded by a pack of hustle and bustle Brits.
Good support from Glynis Johns as the stewardess aboard the Reindeer and Marlene Dietrich as movie star Monica Teasdale, also a passenger aboard the airplane, both of whom get caught up in Honey's apprehension and fears of an impending disaster that he is certain is staring them in the face, although nobody else really takes any of it seriously...
His solution to keeping the airplane grounded until his lab tests are concluded is certainly an interesting turn of events.Considering the vintage of this film (1951) it has decent F/X and remains a bit of a period piece, demonstrating how air travel used to be done before mass transport Jumbo Jets and economy class seating.
even though they may have doubts about his work and his theories.Good cast across the board, with some standouts like Jack Hawkins who is always fine, and Marlene Dietrich who at first seems to be there solely as Star Appeal although after a bit of time passes, her presence becomes more and more genuine.
and as a sidenote, for the look back at the way the fledgling airline industry and how it was coming into its own.It also inadvertently provides a sobering point to ponder since this film was produced several years before the British De Haviland Comet jet airliner entered service and disastrously became aviation's first great example of the potential for a catastrophic structural failure caused by a design fault, which although corrected quickly, still didn't save the airliner from the stigma it suffered when several crashed after they experienced explosive decompression at high altitude from something as simple as having cabin windows too large and the wrong shape.The British airline industry must have collectively flashed back to this film during the mid-1950s and the Comet's woes, and how prophetic "No Highway In The Sky" must have seemed at the time.This film also includes some considerable supporting talent, almost all of which went uncredited, such as Kenneth More and Wilfrid Hyde-White..
(e.g. The British Comet disasters of the early 50's happened after this film was made) (Also think about the engineers at Thiokol battling NASA over the Challenger launch) James Stewart, a pilot himself, shows us that this courage of facts versus opinion and profit is the courage that should be encouraged and rewarded.35+ years later, I am an engineer and I owe a great deal of it to this film..
The film is well written and acted by Jimmy Steward, Glynis Johns, Marlene Dietrich, and Jack Hawkins.
An enduring film masterpiece for thoughtful adults.The supporting actors are first rate: the daughter was surprising believable, the wonderful Glynis Johns in her usual dream performance.
I recently discovered this film on cable and found it to play somewhat like a long "Twilight Zone" episode where Stewart's character who is a scientist tries to convince the pilot of a transatlantic flight that the airline's structure will collapse and that everyone will be killed unless they turn back.
His daughter Janette Scott is a bright little girl, approaching her puberty though and not real well equipped to handle it.Stewart is convinced that a new type metal alloy used on a new line of aircraft passenger planes will weaken after so many hours of flight and cause crashes.
He is a respected scientist and people listen to him, like stewardess Glynis Johns and traveling film star Marlene Dietrich.Of course when the tail section does not fall off in the time he thought, Stewart is made the object of ridicule.
Stood her in very good stead in Scott's later career.Poor Marlene, two films with James Stewart and she didn't get him in either.
Expect to see airplanes furnished like ships of the era, with good service, plenty of room, people really traveling (dressing up, sharing stories with each other, having a sense of wonder about being somewhere else).Also note the curious American/English contrast between Stewart and his household servant.
Stewart plays Theadore Honey, a brilliant aeronautical engineer who has discovered a flaw in the design of a new airplane that will result in its tail falling off after a certain number of air hours.
This movie is a great example early stress testing methods, even though the lead character (Mr. Honey, played by James Stewart) is a stereotypical scatterbrained genius.
I believe I already knew about that tragedy by the time I saw the movie "No Highway In the Sky", so I didn't think it was funny at all, in fact I assumed that Metal Fatigue was the cause of the tails falling off (not sure whether the movie mentions that though).Neville Shute by the way, has written a number of excellent aviation thrillers, but the only other one I remember was called "Cone of Silence".
I have to point out to start with that I read the book first, so I came to the film with a lot of ideas and preconceptions.The choice of Jimmy Stewart to play Theodore Honey was a bit of a shock.
The technical side is very clearly handled, but then Shute was an aeronautical engineer as well as a novelist.Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich are wonderful in their tangled relationships with Honey.You've probably never heard of this film.
The drama aboard the tense overseas flight involves Marlene Dietrich as Monica Teasdale, a glamorous film star; a touching Glynis Johns as Marjorie, a sympathetic stewardess; and Kenneth Moore as the co-pilot.
Jack Hawkins appears as Scott, a new department manager, and Wilfred Hyde White makes a brief appearance as a researcher.While uneven and unconvincing at times, "No Highway in the Sky" offers a priceless look at air travel more than half a century ago, a fine James Stewart performance, and the timeless beauty of Marlene Dietrich.
I just saw this film and found it very entertaining, something I was quite dubious about when it started; a very old film, black and white, small screen..., but it's so tightly drawn that grabs your interest from the very beginning and there are no let downs from there on to the very end.The tension created from the beginning keeps going for quite a while, not in a nerve wrecking manner, but in a quiet, subdue undercurrent that will keep you interested until the final denouement.Sometimes it's very interesting to watch old films --let's say from two, three generations ago-- because without us realizing it, as life goes on, costumes change unnoticeably on a day to day basis and our memory being quite short, forgets "how things were" back then and a movie like this one brings to the present manners, places, vehicles, that that to us now look prehistoric, but fascinating.For example, the plane itself, central motif of the whole picture; it seems a dream to us now to see that passengers had so much room in front of their legs (almost a small salon in front of every two seats) exquisite stewardesses with tailor made uniforms, impeccably well groomed, taking care of you with superb manners; a plane with very large windows, actually more like a train in the air than an airplane as we know them.I tend to think that this airplane was totally idealized, as any Hollywood product at the time used to be idealized for whatever reasons the studios then could have had.
Put Jimmy Stewart, Marlene Dietrich and Glynis Johns together and you have a love story with a time bomb ticking.
Rather unpleasant melodrama, released abroad simply as "No Highway", has fidgety scientist James Stewart flying in a crowded plane that he believes will suffer from metal fatigue; convincing the other passengers they are in great danger becomes quite a problem.
Those of us who were kids in the '60s and had parents who loved classic films watched "Saturday Night at the Movies," and I'm fairly certain No Highway had its TV debut there.The story concerns Theodore Honey, an expatriate widower who is a real absent minded scientist type.
Glynis Johns is the flight attendant who remains gracious and unflappable, despite the fact that Theodore is a little strange.The plane lands early due to bad weather, and Theodore forces the issue so that he can prove his theory.
So does he.Johns is lovely, and there is a good performance by Jack Hawkins, but the standout, besides Stewart, is glamorous and stunning Marlene Dietrich as film star Monica Teasdale.
In this film called " No Highway in the Sky " James Stewart (An actual pilot in real life) plays Theodore Honey a scientific and theoretical Engineer who develops an outlandish theory about a new airplane.
The scientist in him is so sure of himself that while flying on said airplane, he convinces a popular movie actress Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich) to prepare for a crash landing at sea.
James Stewart (the most underrated of American male stars), Marlene Dietrich, and Glynis Johns all shine in their roles.
This film is a bit of a mixture.Stewart doing his Mr Smith character.Marlene being a film star,what else.Glyn is John's going to look after Jeanette Scott,was that part of the airline service?As a film it doesn't really hold together,rather like the film.
Brilliant but slightly eccentric RAE scientist Theodore Honey (Stewart) has a theory that the tail section on the new "Rutland Reindeer" aircraft may fail suddenly via metal fatigue, after an exact number of flight hours.
Today Bangor airport is like a ghost town; plenty of aircraft pass by, but almost no international flights stop there any more.Anyway this film, whilst it (quite understandably) doesn't portray the science with perfect accuracy, stands up pretty well as entertainment; Jimmy Stewart had a knack of playing eccentric characters with a disarming deftness (think of his role as Mr Dowd the film 'Harvey' from the year before, for instance) and this is a case in point.
Marlene Dietrich plays well but really her role is incidental to that of Glynis Johns, who is utterly charming in this film as stewardess/nurse Corder.
I don't know how many real-life scientists would appreciate this, but it makes for a fascinating character dynamic.The section of the film on board the airplane is a predecessor to disaster movies to follow which would follow which would feature a diverse array of characters in danger.
I'm a fan of Glynis Johns (this was the first movie I noticed her in, another reason I love the film), and a romantic who does not like suspense about the happiness of an ending, only the details.
Nice Gem. No Highway in the Sky (1951) *** (out of 4) James Stewart plays a scientist who has a theory that a certain plane model will lose its tail in flight after so many hours in the sky.
This film was made before the Comet disasters, and the public probably had little knowledge of the subject.The biggest problem, in my view, is casting James Stewart as Dr Theo Honey (the "boffin" whose research forms the core of the plot).
Whereas in the book, Norway builds up Mr Honey's character much more subtly: Honey is all too acutely aware of the implications of his research, he tragically lacks the "front" to convince others of what his work means.I thought the pilot, Captain Samuelson, was likewise coarsely drawn in the film relative to the book.On the other hand, Marlene Dietrich cast as Monica Teasdale is pretty much spot-on.
The slightly autistic and introverted aeronautical engineer, as portrayed by James Stewart, while mostly credible, makes a late discovery that indicates a recently developed plane's structure will fail from metal fatigue after exactly 1440 hours of flying time (and not just approximately 1400 hours, mind you!).
No Highway in the Sky (1951)Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart team up again, after the crazy and rather terrific "Destry Rides Again," for a very different kind of movie.
While the science in this thing is decidedly weak (the concept of the fatigue failure mechanism, while not unrealistic in and of itself, is grossly oversimplified and peppered with references virtually alchemistic in their arcane irrelevance), the thing that makes the movie special is the crafting of the characters.While in real life Jimmy Stewart was a life-long aviation enthusiast who was an accomplished civilian and combat pilot and even a brigadier general in the United States Air Force Reserve, here he is cast as just the opposite -- a classic laboratory-bound research type who by modern standards (c.
(It has become popular in some parts of the news media to sometimes attribute Asperger's to the even some of the most successful people in the tech industry.) The fact that during the events that make up the plot Stewart actually becomes emotionally connected enough to his fellow human beings to risk everything he has to save their lives represents a something of a watershed moment in his character's life.Marlene Dietrich, in turn, comes across as one of those movie actresses you hear about sometimes who is a star not only on but also off the screen, an insightful lady who is very sure of what she knows and what she can do, regardless of what others might think, and who is as absolutely fearless in her own much more sociable way as Stewart can be in his awkward way in taking charge and asserting herself where she sees the need.
"No Highway in the Sky" is a very good British cinematic drama directed by Henry Koster and starring my favorite actor James Stewart.
Mr. Honey has put a great deal of work into his theory that a certain type of metallic aircraft known as a Reindeer will crack up from metal fatigue after 1,440 hours of flying time.
Two women on the plane who sympathize with Mr. Honey and believe in the urgency of his eventual fears are Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich), a famous movie actress, and Marjorie Corder (Glynis Johns), one of the two stewardesses.Let's discuss a few of the main characters of "No Highway in the Sky." James Stewart is simply wonderful as Theodore Honey, a very kind & soft-spoken man who is quite humorous in his few bits of gawky absentmindedness as he works in a house that is overly cluttered with books and papers; he even has a strangely urgent way of walking.
And now, aboard the airplane, he meets two women, Glynnis Johns, a stewardess, and Marlene Dietrich, who is Monica Teasdale, the famous film star.
The story holds up pretty well though the technology looks dated now.James Stewart , Marlene Dietrich, and Glynis Johns head up a talented cast about a new technology passenger plane called the "Reindeer" which gets into the air without being properly tested for possible problems.
While flying on another Reindeer, he finds out that they are in danger of a crash.The chemistry between Dietrich, Johns, & Stewart helps to carry the story.
Having recently read "No Highway In the Sky" by Neville Shute, I watched the 1951 film "No Highway |with James Stewart playing Theodore Honey, Marlene Dietrich as the aging film star, Monica Teasdale, and Glynis Johns as the stewardess Marjorie Corder who takes a shine to Mr Honey {as does Monica Teasdale}, Of course, compression is inevitable when transferring a novel of several hundred pages to a film running only 98 minutes, but it is remarkable how true to the source the director Henry Koster remains despite the fact that some plot elements seem rushed through.
The cast is James Stewart (Theodore Honey, an extremely eccentric, absent-minded scientist), Marlene Dietrich (Monica Teasdale, a popular actress), Glynis Johns, (Marjorie Corder, stewardess who befriends the Honey family) & Jack Hawkins (Dennis Scott, Honey's boss).Honey has a theory that a "Reindeer" Airplane crash was caused when the tail cracked & dropped off.
To add to the movie's problems, Jimmy Stewart over-acts and turns his character into a caricature.
The casting is also very good, with Marlene Dietrich essentially playing herself, Jack Hawkins as the sole ally, and Glynis Johns as a sympathetic stewardess..
Only Jimmy's character makes me not hate engineers for an hour and a half.Be that as it may, this is a very engaging movie about an airliner that Mr. Honey is convinced is going to crash and he tries to get them grounded.