The High and the Mighty (1954)

Ken Childs: Keep talking, please keep talking; I'm frightened...
May Holst: Talking? Honey, you dont know what you're asking. Tell you a good joke on me: You know, I always dreaded the idea of becoming an old woman. And the way things look now, I won't have to worry about it any more. You know, I haven't been whistled at in years, and the idea of growing roses for the rest of my life is really beginning to haunt me. There oughta be a home for dames like me. Yup - we shoulda organized. You know, a house somewhere with no mirror in it, far away where we never have to look at a young girl. They have homes for unmarried mothers but everybody forgets about the girls who - who never quite managed to make things legal. I think I could start one! Yeah - I could call it the May Holst Home for Broken-Down Broads. I kind of like that, don't you?

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[first lines]
Ben Sneed: Hey fella, ain't you Dan Roman?
Dan Roman: Yeah.
Ben Sneed: I heard you whistlin' and I said to myself only one guy does that just so.

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[last lines]
Tim Garfield: So Long. So long, you ancient pelican.

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The actual DC-4 aircraft used to film the passenger boarding and flying sequences was a former military surplus Douglas C-54A-10-DC built in 1944. When filmed, the aircraft (then registered as N4726V) was being operated by Transocean Airlines for whom the film's author, Ernest K. Gann, had flown these planes over the Hawaii-California routes. Known as the "The Argentine Queen," before being acquired by Transocean in 1953 it had been the personal aircraft of Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón. Ironically, a little more than a decade after appearing in the film this aircraft and the nine persons on board were lost on March 28, 1964, when the plane was forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean about 700 miles west of San Francisco. The plane was about eight hours into a charter flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles when the pilot reported a serious fire in engine #2. The Coast Guard searched for the aircraft for five days but no trace of it was ever found.
Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Dorothy McGuire all turned down roles in this film.
Producer John Wayne chose Robert Cummings as his co-star for the role of Captain Sullivan. Director William A. Wellman, however, overrode his producer and chose Robert Stack for the part.
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