The Flight of the Phoenix

A cargo plane goes down in a sandstorm over the Sahara, far off course and hundreds of kilometres from any hope of rescue. The survivors include the pilot, Frank Towns, his navigator Lew Moran, and a German aircraft designer, Heinrich Dorfmann. As food and water dwindle and tensions rise among men who were strangers to one another, Dorfmann proposes an unlikely way out: cut the wing off the wreck and build a new aircraft around it. The group must decide whether the plan is genius or delusion before the desert finishes them.

Robert Aldrich directed and produced the film, the tenth of the seventeen he directed, released between Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte and The Dirty Dozen, from a screenplay by Lukas Heller. James Stewart plays Towns, with Richard Attenborough as Moran, Hardy Krüger as Dorfmann, Peter Finch as Captain Harris, Ernest Borgnine as Trucker Cobb and Ian Bannen as Crow. Made for about 5 million dollars, it runs 142 minutes and sits within the adventure and drama genres.

Audience response has been durable: on IMDb it holds 7.5 out of 10 from roughly 24,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.2 from a much smaller base of 389 votes. A critics' rating of 7.8 from 22 reviews places professional assessment slightly above both audience scores.