Sole Survivor (1970)
In 1960, the ruins of an American bomber were found in the Libyan desert, but the remains of the crew were never located. In Guerdon Trueblood's teleplay, the ghosts of a bomber crew hang around their derelict plane, awaiting the day that their bones will be recovered and given a decent burial. The sole survivor, navigator Russell Hamner, has in the intervening 25 years become a General. He joins an investigation team that has come across the wreckage, while the ghosts, headed by Major Devlin, plot to expose Hamner as a coward who deserted his post and left his crew mates to die.
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Five airmen remain with their bomber plane in the middle of the Libyan desert hoping to be rescued. They have crash-landed but something is odd about this scenario. Any time that they start to trek in a certain direction, they always end up at the crash site. It also seems that they have been at the location for 17 years with nothing else to do but play baseball. The day comes when their plane is spotted and Major Vince Edwards (Devlin) and Colonel William Shatner (Josef) are sent to identify the wreckage and produce a report. They take with them General Richard Basehart (Hamner), who was the sixth crew member who parachuted out and survived 17 years ago. When they arrive, they don't see any of the airmen and they start to put their report together. The airmen are definitely there, though! Edwards persists in unravelling the truth.The inspiration for the setting of the story is the real-life incident involving the bomber plane 'Lady Be Good' which disappeared in 1943 and was spotted in the Libyan desert in 1958. Many details are retained for the film, eg, the intact wreckage and an urn of tea found at the crash site still being drinkable. As for the film, the story is excellently told as we follow two sides – the airmen who seem to be wandering in limbo and the investigators who are trying to piece together what happened. Can the truth be discovered and will the airmen's lives finally be redirected to wherever they need to go? The acting is good – William Shatner has a few Captain Kirk moments but that is what you want to see - and the ending is memorably done. It's a film that stays with you and keeps you watching for the duration. It also gets you thinking as to what might happen after death. And just who is the sole survivor?
A superb film and a pleasant surprise to come across it on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqxZoVLn6Tg.Compelling from start to finish and very original even though based on a true story.The story is well presented and unfolds cleverly keeping you thinking all the time and not quite sure what is going to happen next. Shatner is fine even though he still playing Kirk as in all his films. The performances of the the aviators are great and the casting is spot on. I started watching this film at 1am and only intended to watch the first half hour but couldn't stop watching it until the I reached the satisfying conclusion. Very very good!
After a B-24 heavy bomber was discovered in the Libyan desert years ago, it inspired this interesting little film. It's about a B-25 (a much smaller bomber) that is discovered in the same desert and it presents an odd sort of mystery...as the surviving crew member was picked up near Sicily...yet the plane crashed into the desert on the other side of the Mediterranean. This makes the story that the survivor (now a General) a complete lie. How could the man have jumped out of a burning plane...yet it continued on its way for hundreds and hundreds of miles?The way this mystery is presented it VERY novel. For much of the early portion of the film, you see it from the viewpoint of the crew...all alive and huddled around their crashed plane. Soon you realize what's happened...these men are really dead and the men are but ghosts! So, when the plane is discovered and Air Force folks come to investigate, the ghosts are cheering them on--pushing them to uncover the truth. One officer (William Shatner) is in favor of just sweeping everything under the rug, so to speak. The other is anxious to get to the truth (Vince Edwards)...regardless of the consequences. Weird...but very unusual and worth seeing, as I really appreciate innovative film work...and this is very unusual to say the least! Plus, it's very well made and the acting is superb.
Lately I've been listening to an audio book called "Great Military Blunders of the 20th Century" and during the huge section on WWII a brief chapter came up describing the fate of "Lady be Good." As I got to talking with my wife about the incident, I realized there had to be a connection with the haunting TV movie I'd seen decades ago. I still remember watching it on the B&W TV in my family's basement - with no one else around & believe me it stuck with me. I didn't see any comments on one of the conversations of the ghost crew when one of the members is amazed & fairly disappointed/upset that the Brooklyn Dodgers are no longer in Brooklyn but out in LA. That little bit stuck with me over the years, maybe because I'm from the NYC area. Today all that pathos, pain, relief & a whole bunch of emotions that the young guys felt as they suddenly started their journey to their final resting place, came flooding back as if I'd just watched the movie. Though Learmedia has the film for a whopping 27 dollars and change, I AM absolutely going to buy this film. Now that I think about it, the ideas about death in this film, clearly influenced my own writing in a book - a novel - I am about to release called "The Rest is Silence" ," where the person telling the story, the main character's first wife, has died & is trying to work out/figure out the confusion and anger she feels toward her husband. As others have pointed out, they just don't make them like this anymore. In fact, but for the exception of this film, TV movie or not, and a few like it, maybe they never did. For years I'd mixed this one up with Flight of the Phoenix. Now I realize, except for the desert, they have very little in common. Thanks!