The Crowded Sky (1960)
(On Cable TV, July 2021) In most respects, The Crowded Sky is a turgid drama, with so many thoughts-as-voiceovers that it becomes a device fit to create more hilarity than introspection. (I suspect that it inspired some of Airplane! funnier moments.) It’s creaky, interminable, naïve and disjointed. But there is one aspect in which it’s utterly fascinating: as a proto-catastrophe movie, not quite understanding how to best fit the pieces at its disposal for a far more streamlined thrilling experience. The basics are simple enough: Over the increasingly busy airspace of 1960 (the melodramatically dubbed “crowded sky”), a military plane collides with a passenger jet, killing a few, and endangering many. If that premise sounds familiar, you’re not crazy — it was reused almost as-is as a basis for later catastrophe film Airport 1975. But that was fourteen years later, after the runaway success of Airport, after Hollywood better understood how to build a thrill machine, after audiences had grown used to ordinary disasters and started asking for sustained catastrophes. You can clearly see the difference here: The idea of presenting characters that are then put in jeopardy is sound, but The Crowded Sky spends far too much time on character development and nearly nothing on how they react to their peril. The narrative structure itself is lopsided, putting the catastrophe at the very end of the film, cutting short any sense of lingering danger. Director Joseph Pevney repeatedly places emphasis on the “wrong” elements, spending some time creating wonderful dramatic subplots (such as a young pilot/painter rediscovering his father’s heritage) that have nothing to do with the impending disaster. In a few words, The Crowded Sky still thinks of itself as a drama with a few genre elements, rather than as a genre piece by itself. That wouldn’t have been so bad had the script been more elegant in how it approached its narrative structure. Here, unfortunately, we have the characters looking pensively into space as a voiceover reveals their thoughts to the audience, a theatrical device that could have been effective (and actually is, the first time it’s used, by lowering the light around the thinking character) but is here presented in such a ham-fisted way that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. It’s the additional touch that makes the final film hard to take all that seriously, even despite some interesting period material and brief moment of effective drama. Too bad that the character development and the catastrophe don’t interact as well as they should. If you want to see The Crowded Sky done right—or at least better—, then have a look at the Airport series: The disaster takes place earlier, the characters have the opportunity to react to it, and the pacing goes much faster without any intrusive monologues. But that’s the nature of genre evolution — there has to be someone doing it half-badly for someone else to pick up and rearrange the pieces more effectively.