The Flight of the Phoenix: Flight or Fight

In a way, the reverence Towns expresses in The Flight of the Phoenix for a particular kind of freewheeling journey is not so different from Aldrich’s own preferences when it came to his filmmaking process, which, here as always, was an adaptable one, determined by circumstances and the people around him. Six-time Aldrich collaborator Lukas Heller took liberties with his big-screen adaptation of Elleston Trevor’s 1964 novel, and, in turn, Aldrich took liberties with Heller’s screenplay. The final stage of the film’s writing process came into focus with the actors’ involvement. As with many of his pictures, there was a three-week rehearsal period for Phoenix during which Aldrich worked with his illustrious company. Together, the actors helped Aldrich revamp the language in the film, which was especially helpful given their diverse backgrounds. They homed in on how their characters would actually speak and act, providing this genre film with a very human foundation. It’s a big movie with a big airplane, impressively filmed on location in the Arizona and California deserts, but underneath all of that are the lives of the people at hand, as they are led adrift into Aldrich’s typically (and increasingly, at this stage in his career) existential terrain.

After the plane hits the golden ground and the men bury Bill and Tasso, the film begins its transition to the psychological, becoming a portrait of men in extremis. Towns sets about lending his energy to his very flawed men. When Cobb finally has a nervous breakdown and flees the camp the men have set up, it is Towns who goes after him despite the fact that it’s most definitely a fool’s errand. The sequence—involving a truly disconcerting moment in which a clearly out-of-his-mind Cobb, with a sunburned and horribly gashed face, writes his name in the sand before finally collapsing—recalls the famous section of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in which Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence heads back into the desert to find a fallen comrade despite the seemingly insurmountable odds against him. But whereas Lawrence comes back triumphant, the rising sun’s brightness mirroring the miracle at hand, Towns’s return to camp without Cobb only further deflates the situation, the dark and dampened mood in stark contrast to the glaring, arid landscape.

As time creeps on, each of the men goes further into himself, grappling with the nature of survival, some receding into inaction and others grasping at any semblance of a plan, any forward momentum, that might occupy them. With no sign of rescue, all the men growing the worse for wear, Dorfmann demands that they take what remains of the plane and build a new one that will fly them to safety. Towns’s lived experience contradicts Dorfmann’s calculated theory, but all the men together ultimately decide, in the words of Attenborough’s Moran, to take a chance instead of continuing to sit around waiting to die.

His was a career born of the specific mechanics and possibilities of the Hollywood studio system. But by 1965, that system was on its last legs, and epic tales of men in crisis—in the years leading up to The Flight of the Phoenix, there were The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Great Escape (1963), and many others—would soon give way to smaller, more homegrown tales of men in crisis, such as Easy Rider (1969) and Mean Streets (1973). But in Phoenix, there’s also a through line pointing to a different path down which Hollywood would soon turn. Toward the end, when Dorfmann’s new plane miraculously flies, rising from the ashes and earning the name that Standish painted on it earlier, the film anticipates the early work of Steven Spielberg and his conjuring of a particular kind of Hollywood magic rooted in the impossible becoming possible, in watching temperamentally different men overcome overwhelming obstacles together.

Made only a decade later, Spielberg’s game-changing Jaws owes much to Aldrich’s visions of men at the ends of their ropes. Jaws features a much more visible and concrete enemy than Phoenix, and Spielberg creates a larger social and moral context for the confrontation his heroes face—it isn’t just their lives at stake—but the mechanics of his film are strikingly similar to those of Aldrich’s. The dangers of the sand become the dangers of the water, and the isolation of these vastly different environments presents similar challenges—practically and psychologically. Despite the large shark that circles the not-big-enough boat, the real enemy in Jaws—as in Phoenix—is the opposition among the outlooks of the main characters, here Roy Scheider’s Brody, Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper, and Robert Shaw’s Quint, with each man embodying a different idea of what exactly makes a man a man. And the pure giddiness that Brody and Hooper share in the water as they untangle themselves from the remnants of their battle is directly akin to Towns and Dorfmann’s elation when they emerge from the sand and scattered plane pieces after their final flight, damaged but very much alive—their different modes of thought no longer of any importance as they laugh and walk together, cracking jokes about the metric system.

When asked about the new generation of filmmakers several years after he made The Flight of the Phoenix, Aldrich would highlight the differences in their methods, in how they got to where they were:

All those guys are products of film schools. They’re quite brilliant. Spielberg is clearly the most brilliant. In my day, there were no film schools. You learned by working as an assistant director on three films with Milestone, two with Losey, two with Wellman, and one with Chaplin. Even when you worked with a very bad director, you learned what not to do. Filmmakers today learned their craft differently. You’re talking about two entirely different ways of thinking. Maybe that’s why there’s so little contact between the two generations.

In the sixties, that nascent generational rift was very present in Aldrich’s films. Picking up where he left off with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Davis and Olivia de Havilland in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Phoenix continued Aldrich’s project of deglamorizing Hollywood icons. The director and his makeup team slowly transform their elder idol Stewart and the rest of the respected cast into sun-beaten zombies over the course of the film. The striking portrait close-ups that cinematographer Joseph Biroc uses to punctuate his wide-open vistas take on an eerie new form the longer the characters are in the desert. Their faces slowly redden, abrade, and peel, with the piercing blue eyes of Stewart, Attenborough, and Krüger shining through their increasingly horrific masks. Aldrich would push this kind of deglamorization even further post-Phoenix, especially with The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), with their heightened focus on violence and sex.