Trivia and Quotes
Quotes
 fegrthy defrgth
sfrgthj
[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.
[last lines]
Tim Garfield: So Long. So long, you ancient pelican.
Gonzales: [shipboard radio operator Gonzales is advising the pilots of surface conditions they can expect if they ditch the aircraft] Heavy northwest swells. We`re rolling about thirty degrees. Very rough. Keep that ship in the air if you can, boy, it`s wet down here!
Hobie Wheeler: [acknowledging the transmission from the ship] Roger, Cristobal Trader. We`ll try.
Gonzales: Attaboy, papa!
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?
Alsop: She may be put together with paste and flour, but that woman has something. What would you say it was?
Miss Spalding: Practice. Plenty of practice.
Trivia
The lyrics to the famed title song are only heard at the very end, are sung by a large choral group, and are different than the familiar lyrics heard in the popular-song record releases of the time.
Jan Sterling reportedly shaved her eyebrows for her role in the film and they never grew back.
John Wayne`s first film in CinemaScope.
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.
Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Dorothy McGuire all turned down roles in this film.
Spencer Tracy was originally cast as Dan Roman. He backed out of the film, however, after hearing several negative comments about how strict a disciplinarian director William A. Wellman was.
Average Shot Length (ASL) = 11 seconds
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.
Towards the end of the movie, when Robert Stack tells John Wayne to whistle something (because he works better with music), the tune that John Wayne whistles is, "I`m a Ramblin` Wreck from Georgia Tech".
John Wayne`s role was first offered to Spencer Tracy. However, Tracy, a Democrat who opposed blacklisting, wanted nothing to do with Wayne`s Batjac production company and turned the part down.
|
Comments
Submit a Comment