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No Highway in the Sky

No Highway in the Sky
No Highway in the Sky.jpg
Directed by Henry Koster
Produced by Louis D. Lighton
Written by Alec Coppel
Oscar Millard
R. C. Sherriff
Based on No Highway
1948 novel
by Nevil Shute
Starring James Stewart
Marlene Dietrich
Glynis Johns
Jack Hawkins
Music by Malcolm Arnold
Cinematography Georges Périnal
Edited by Manuel del Campo
Production
company
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.
Distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.
Release date
  • 28 June 1951 (1951-06-28) (UK)
  • 21 September 1951 (1951-09-21) (U.S.)
Running time
98 min.
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Box office $1,150,000 (US rentals)

No Highway in the Sky (also known as No Highway) is a 1951 British black-and-white aviation film from 20th Century Fox, produced by Louis D. Lighton directed by Henry Koster, that stars James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns, Niall MacGinnis and Jack Hawkins. The screenplay was written by Oscar Millard, with additional material provided by Alec Coppel.

The film is based on the novel No Highway by Nevil Shute and was one of the first films that depicted a potential aviation disaster involving metal fatigue. Although the film follows Shute's original 1948 novel closely, No Highway in the Sky notably omits references to the supernatural contained in the original novel, including the use of automatic writing to resolve a key element in the original novel's story.

Theodore Honey (James Stewart), an eccentric "boffin" with the Royal Aircraft Establishment, is working on solving a difficult aviation crash problem. A widower with a 12-year-old daughter, Elspeth (Janette Scott), Honey is sent from Farnborough to investigate the crash of a Rutland Reindeer airliner in Labrador, Canada. He theorizes the accident happened because of the tailplane's structural failure, caused by sudden metal fatigue after 1440 flight hours. To test the theory in his laboratory, a rear airframe is being vibrated at a very high rate in daily eight-hour cycles.


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