Five Came Back (1939) - full review!
Directed by John Farrow, with a story by Richard Carroll that was scripted by Jerome Cady, Dalton Trumbo, and Nathanael West, this above average adventure drama is one of the first to put an ensemble cast of characters from varied backgrounds in peril - the heart of the story shows how persons’ real character traits are revealed in a survival environment. Later used by director Alfred Hitchcock in Lifeboat (1943) (and remade by director Farrow as Back From Eternity (1956)), and most recently by so called reality television producers, this popular concept typically utilizes a desert or island locale and oftentimes a shipwreck or airplane accident to strand its passengers, isolated and cut off from civilization. Frequently, there are constraints of food supply or safety which force the survivors to choose a plan of action in order to live or rescue themselves. The initially tantalizing question of who will lead or survive in such circumstances is sometimes surprisingly answered. The cast is terrific and recognizable to most movie mavens:
Chester Morris plays pilot Bill Brooks, Kent Taylor plays his co-pilot Joe. Patric Knowles plays wealthy young businessman Judson Ellis, who's eloping with his secretary Alice Melbourne, played by Wendy Barrie. A surprisingly beautiful young Lucille Ball plays a fallen woman, Peggy Nolan. Joseph Calleia plays an anarchist named Vasquez that John Carradine’s bounty hunter Mr. Crimp is escorting back to justice (to be hung) in his native South American country. Allen Jenkins plays a gangster's hit man named Pete, who's taking his mob boss's son Tommy Mulvaney, played by child actor Casey Johnson (in his film debut), to safety outside of the United States. During the flight, it's learned that Tommy's father was killed in a gang shooting. C. Aubrey Smith plays retiring botany professor Henry Spengler, and Elisabeth Risdon plays his longtime wife Martha. Selmer Jackson (among others) appears uncredited, as an airlines official.
Their Coast Air flight leaves from municipal airport, from a nondescript Southern California city, en route to South America. The Silver Queen is of the sleeper variety and some of the passengers have preconceived notions about their fellow travel mates. After landing at a stopover in Guatemala, during which Joe expresses an interest in Ellis’s attractive blonde fiancée Alice, the pilots soon find themselves in a storm as their journey continues. After losing one engine, they decide to crash land in a forest, during which no one is seriously injured. Professor Spengler surmises that they've landed between two mountain ranges such that their only way out is through the air. Bill estimates that the plane can be repaired with 3 weeks. They solve their 1-2 week food supply problem by becoming vegetarians, though Pete is able to shoot the occasional deer. Unfortunately, the professor is able to identify, per the native drums heard, that cannibals are in the forest, making their need to repair the plane and get out of there more urgent.
I won't spoil who survives and who doesn't, nor how, but the film's title tells you that five will "come back"; these have to be chosen, among those that aren't killed in other ways, because the plane will have a limited runway on which to take off in order to clear the trees, so weight is at a premium. During the course of the weeks it takes to repair the plane and clear this runway, the true characters of the passengers are witnessed and their relationships to one another change.
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