Where Aldrich excels in particular is infusing small moments with character significance. There's not a dud scene in the whole of its relatively lengthy running time (that's not to say there aren't a few oddities but more on those later) and the suspense at times is up there with the best Hitchcockian moments. So it's both a race against time and a pressure cooker drama with men at the limits of their survival capabilities and it's a corker primarily due to a smart script by Lukas Heller based on Elleston Trevor's novel and a superb cast who imbue even the smallest of roles with real bite. After figuring out when the water will run out, the German engineer Dorfmann suggests rebuilding another plane from the wreckage, hence the name 'Phoenix'. The soldier, Captain Harris, suggests walking through the desert to get help. Once down, and after sustaining a few fatalities, the men realise they are so far off course that a rescue attempt is unlikely. Encountering a sandstorm, the pilot, Frank Towns, has to crash land. Among the group is a pair of British soldiers, various oil workers, an aeronautical engineer, and a doctor.
What's the scoop? A twin prop passenger plane takes off over the Libyan Desert ferrying its travellers to Benghazi. There is a great deal to be enjoyed but I'm getting ahead of myself. Ignored and a failure on its release, Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix has since enjoyed a re-evaluation and now sits proudly in the 'classic' seat of the disaster genre.
His biggest hit coming on the heels of one of his biggest disappointments, The Dirty Dozen, was a violent sensation on release and now probably plays uncut on Sunday afternoons. For their time, his war pictures skirted with barely acceptable screen violence. Unfailingly manly (if we can still use that word without irony) Aldrich's movies often presented overtly masculine subjects and treated them with great gusto and humour. If the famously macho Ernest Hemmingway had a brother who directed movies, Aldrich was his man. Aldrich's career encompasses a lot of great work but he never made it into the 'auteur' club however much European critics tried to crowbar him into it. It's true that Aldrich never managed to maintain height in a career with its fair share of wonderful movies but there were also a number of so-so films that the director wasn't shy about condemning. In his seminal tome The American Cinema, critic Andrew Sarris sets Aldrich in the category he calls 'The Far Side of Paradise', directors who would be in the pantheon of their craft if not dogged by a "fragmentation of their personal vision" or "disruptive career problems". The filmmaker has good form and a very personal directorial voice.
His is neither an above-the-title director's name but nor is it an ignored journeyman's. From my limited and inevitably prejudiced cinematic point of view, Robert Aldrich is a name that conjures up memories of solidly wrought adult dramas and the odd comedy.
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