Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Scott LeBrun It seems impossible now to review or comment on this suspense favourite without mentioning the comedy classic "Airplane!", which came along 23 years later and quite effectively spoofed this film. In fact, if you're like this viewer and have seen "Airplane!" multiple times, you'll be amazed at how faithful Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker were to the story here, and how many lines are lifted verbatim from this script. Of course, you'll also be conditioned to expect the zingers to happen as well.Still, regardless of whether or not this story *had* ever been spoofed, it really is a tense, effective, and sweat inducing thriller, highly quotable, and appropriately atmospheric. Hall Bartlett - who also wrote the screenplay with producer John Champion and story author Arthur Hailey - does a masterful job with the direction, getting lots of mileage out of a minimum of sets.The acting is sincere all the way down the line as Dana Andrews stars in the film as Ted Stryker, war veteran and former pilot who can't get over his wartime trauma. Teds' fed-up wife Ellen (Linda Darnell) takes off with their young son (Ray Ferrell), and he follows them onto a plane where the flight crew (among them, football great Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch as the pilot) and several of the passengers fall victim to food poisoning. It's up to the neurotic Ted to pilot the plane through a heavy storm to make it to an airport in time to save the afflicted people.One particular element that should be of delight to any Canadian viewer is the fact that this tale takes place in Canada and the air above it. My own hometown is mentioned repeatedly.The solid cast also includes Sterling Hayden as Captain Treleaven, the cranky guy (and old wartime comrade of Teds') who must talk our hero through the situation, Geoffrey Toone as the dedicated doctor, Jerry Paris as passenger Tony Decker, Peggy King as his stewardess girlfriend Janet Turner, Charles Quinlivan as ground controller Harry Burdick, and Steve London as co-pilot Walt Stewart.Highly entertaining all the way through, and at just over 81 minutes, it doesn't go on any longer than it really should, or waste any time.Eight out of 10.

jarrodmcdonald-1 By 1957 standards, this is a rather exciting suspense film. Passengers often worry about what might go wrong when they board a plane. This movie captures those fears well, but it does not play to panic. The only real hysteria that is shown is when the jet crashes down and the lights go out. But we know Dana Andrews has landed the aircraft safely and the crisis has been magnificently averted. The writing for Zero Hour! is carefully laid out. The storytellers do not rush to get to the danger, and they do not hurry the ending, either. Of course, we know the passengers will survive, but the characters change in a life-threatening situation and rise to the occasion, and that is what makes the picture fascinating to watch. Mr. Andrews does particularly well as a haunted pilot who overcomes his demons, taking a flight into death back to life.

ferbs54 Perhaps best known today as the film that inspired the 1980 spoof "Airplane!," "Zero Hour!" (note the exclamation mark that they have in common) can stand on its own as a film worthy of recognition and reappraisal. Cowritten by Arthur Hailey a year before his novel "Flight Into Danger: Runway Zero-Eight" came out, and a full 11 years before his best seller "Airport" hit the bookstores, the film was released in November 1957. Three years before, "The High and the Mighty" had become the archetype for all future airplane disaster films; a CinemaScope spectacular with a large cast and an Oscar-winning theme song. "Zero Hour!" is certainly a smaller film, more serious in tone and with a lesser reliance on soap opera-type interactions among the aircraft's passengers. Indeed, with the exceptions of a few aged, hard-drinking football enthusiasts and the boyfriend of the plane's stewardess, we really don't get to know any of the passengers here at all. Confining its action mainly to the cockpit and the frantic men on the ground who are trying to bring the plane in, the film is an excellent exercise in escalating suspense and nail-biting realism.As the picture opens, we meet a squadron leader in the Canadian Air Force named Ted Stryker (well played, as always, by Dana Andrews), who is leading a bombing mission over Wiesbaden in April 1945. But the mission goes badly, and six of Stryker's men are killed in a dense fog. Flash forward 11 years, and we find Stryker still racked with guilt and self-recrimination regarding his decisions on that fateful day. Having given up flying, he has drifted through a full dozen jobs during the past 10 years, while his wife Ellen (the delicious Linda Darnell) and his young son Joey become more and more estranged. When Ellen decides to leave Ted, taking Joey along with her, Stryker (you've got to love that name!) impulsively boards their airplane--Flight 714 from Winnipeg to Vancouver. And it's a good thing that he does, too, as food poisoning soon lays low everyone on the plane who made the big mistake of ordering the grilled halibut instead of the lamb...including, most seriously, the pilot AND copilot! And so, with the lives of all 38 people onboard the DC-4 depending on him, Stryker must conquer his fear of flying and pilot this jet--a craft that is very much unlike his WW2 fighter plane--through a heavy fog, no less, in for a safe landing, all the while being coached from the ground by Capt. Martin Treleaven (the consistently fine Sterling Hayden). But can he make it all the way to Vancouver and land in pea-soup conditions before all the sick passengers, including little Joey, expire?"Zero Hour!" has been directed by Hall Bartlett in a manner so as to generate maximum tension, and features some very impressive B&W lensing by cinematographer John F. Warren. The film's three great leads do a splendid job of making us buy into the film, and Hayden is particularly fine. His Treleaven character, gruff and tough as can be, is yet given the film's only humorous line, when he declares, "I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!" Darnell, other than a brief emotional conversation with Stryker before takeoff, is given little to do other than parrot instructions from Ground Control, but she looks so scrumptious here that few viewers will be likely to complain! And as for Andrews, well, you can just see the icy panic in his eyes as he maneuvers his jumbo jet and flashes back to his disastrous fogbound mission of 11 years before. He LOOKS as though he is really flying an unwieldy colossus and just barely hanging on; it is a very credible performance, indeed. The film features any number of impressive scenes, including Stryker's first glimpse of the empty cockpit, as the plane flies through the air on autopilot, and the dozens of knobs, readouts, gauges, levers, dials and other gadgetry stare at him (an airplane's cockpit has never appeared so intimidating!), and of course the film's entire final 10 minutes, as Stryker attempts to make his landing. For viewers today, much of the film will assuredly seem bizarre. On this flight, not only do passengers easily board their craft by walking across an airfield, and with no signs of security in sight, but the captain actually strolls through the plane and converses with the passengers; only one stewardess (nicely played by Peggy King, in her first role) is onboard; and--most mind-blowingly--parents are allowed to bring their kids into the cockpit for a casual tour! ("Don't touch anything, Joey!") Yes, times surely have changed! But one thing that will always stay the same, I suppose, is the power of bad fish to lay a person low, and "Zero Hour!" does a nice job of depicting just how dire this believable airborne scenario could be. I can only imagine that current FAA regulations mandate that a pilot and copilot must eat different meals, so as to forestall a situation like this from ever actually arising. After all, not every flight has a man like Ted Stryker aboard!

Lee Eisenberg Nowadays, Hall Bartlett's "Zero Hour!" will probably only seem significant because it's the inspiration for "Airplane!". Indeed, some of the lines from "Airplane!" are lifted straight out of "Zero Hour!", except that the spoof expanded them. While watching the original, I kept throwing out lines from the spoof while expecting Leslie Nielsen to pop up and tell people not to call him Shirley.Anyway, this version casts Dana Andrews as the man who has to become the pilot, Linda Darnell as his estranged wife, Sterling Hayden as his former commanding officer, Elroy Hirsch as the pilot, Geoffrey Toone as the airplane doctor, Jerry Paris (Jerry Helper on "The Dick Van Dyke Show") as a passenger, and Peggy King as the flight attendant. Nothing special about the movie, but it's still pretty fun.So yes, Joey. Do you like movies about gladiators?