Desperate Search *** (1952, Howard Keel, Jane Greer, Patricia Medina, Keenan Wynn) – Classic Movie Review 3544

Cult director Joseph H Lewis’s moderate low-budget 1952 adventure drama thriller stars Howard Keel, Jane Greer, Patricia Medina and Keenan Wynn. It all starts when a Canadian Western Airways Douglas DC-3 airliner takes off from Vancouver but catches fire and crashes in the Canadian north.

It centres on the desperate aerial search of a father, Vince Heldon (Keel), to find his two children Don and Janet (Lee Aaker, Linda Lowell) lost in the wilderness after their airliner has crash-landed in the mountainous frozen wastes of Canada. Vince Heldon’s wife Julie Heldon (Greer) and divorced previous wife Nora Stead (Medina), the children’s mother, both join in the search, along with bush pilot Brandy (Wynn), a family friend. The search is all the more desperate because of incoming bad weather.

With Walter Doniger’s screenplay based on Arthur Mayse’s novel, it is modest but effective stuff with crisp direction by cultish Lewis and a good cast on form, though all the adults are upstaged by Aaker. Also in the cast are Dick Simmons, Robert Burton, Elaine Stewart, Michael Dugan, Jonathan Cott and Jeff Richards.

Scenes of the earlier Captains of the Clouds film are used and they re-use an uncredited stock score, which is Miklós Rózsa’s music for The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Aerial sequences mainly used models and Lewis shot almost all of the film on MGM’s back lot, despite the offer of location shooting. Despite the low budget, MGM still made a loss of $88,000.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3544

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