Fate Is the Hunter

1964 "He played with death to prove a theory"
6.8| 1h46m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 08 November 1964 Released
Producted By: Arcola Pictures
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

A man refuses to believe that pilot error caused a fatal crash, and persists in looking for another reason. Airliner crashes near Los Angeles due to unusual string of coincidences. Stewardess, who is sole survivor, joins airline executives in discovering the causes of the crash.

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Reviews

Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch
Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated
JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!
Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
w22nuschler I had never seen Fate is the Hunter until today. I had bought the DVD because I liked the cast. Glenn Ford & Rod Taylor have leads roles. Nancy Kwan, Suzanne Pleshette & Wally Cox have the supporting roles. It is basically a story of a plane crash and Glenn Ford's determination to prove that his old war buddy Rod Taylor was not the cause of the crash. He has a lot of doubts about his friends character until he talks with Nancy Kwan, Wally Cox and another war buddy. It changes that way he looks at his friend. There is a hearing and it's decided by Ford to recreate the circumstances and take the plane up to see what happened. Without spoiling the ending, it is thrilling to the last minute waiting to see what caused the crash. A suberb film. I only wish Nancy Kwan and Wally Cox had more screen time. Buy the DVD or Blu Ray today.
blanche-2 Glenn Ford stars in "Fate is the Hunter," a 1964 film directed by Ralph Nelson. The film also stars Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Nancy Kwan, Wally Cox, Nehemiah Persoff, Mark Stevens, Constance Towers, and Max Showalter.Ford is Sam McBane, who is called in to determine the cause of a plane crash; a flight attendant, Martha Webster (Pleshette) is the sole survivor of the flight, piloted by Jack Savage (Rod Taylor). The airline is content to call the cause pilot error, but Ford refuses to accept that. He talks to Savage's friends, the women in his life, and finally actually reconstructs the flight in order to find the answer.Ford shows more emotion than usual and gives a strong performance - he actually dominates the film. The other characters have smaller roles. Jane Russell plays herself, and is all glamor as she sings "No Love, No Nothing'"; Wally Cox has a nice role, as does Mark Stevens, who plays an alcoholic friend of Savage's. Pleshette is excellent as the survivor.Good cast, good direction, and you, too, will wonder what actually caused this crash. Was it, as Nancy Kwan, who plays Savage's girlfriend says, fate? A perfect storm? Or something else? Engrossing.
cherimerritt This movie is one of my all-time favorites that I'm happy to share tonight with my movie-buff husband who has never seen it. (I'll bet Tony DiNozzo would remember it, though.) I've been trying to remember the title for ages (couldn't recall Rod Taylor's last name to look it up online. Getting senile I guess.)I agree with Roscoe-4. "It illustrates the many zany and unusual things that can happen to change our lives forever." The actual cause of this plane crash has stuck with me since I first saw the film over 30 years ago on TV. Many times I have caught myself in the midst of a possible negative chain-of-events and changed something I was doing because of this movie (especially if there was a cup of coffee involved in what I was doing). It also probably lead to my interest in Multivariate Statistics (quantification of the phenomenon of multiple variables leading to a single outcome.)Personally, I think everyone should see this film. At least it tells a person to keep looking deeper for causes instead of assuming that "what you think is accurate" is also worth believing just because "it makes sense" to you. "It makes sense" should never be enough by itself to lead us all the way to a conclusion.
Robert J. Maxwell It certainly looks as if the whimsical, Byronic airline captain Rod Taylor is responsible for this accident, which left 52 people dead, himself included, sparing only Susanne Pleshette, the flight attendant. The airline traffic safety board convenes and, despite the strong reservations of executive Glenn Ford, an old friend of Taylor's, is headed towards the dreaded explanation of "pilot error." You see, Taylor was observed patronizing several bars the night before the flight, in the company of someone named Mickey who can't be located. Taylor had a history of cheerful abandon even during the war and he's a kind of convenient scapegoat alright.Glenn Ford, however, is convinced that some other force was at work. He tracks down some old friends of Taylor's and they all vouch for his probity. At the last minute, the mysterious and alcoholic Mickey shows up and reveals that although Taylor bought a dozen drinks the night before the accident, they were all for him, Mickey, not for Taylor Not good enough for the Board of Inquisitors. If it wasn't booze, what was it? Taylor apparently lost one engine after another shortly after take off then, perhaps in a panic, plowed into a pier that no one knew was there.Taking his cue from the gorgeous Nancy Kwan, an oceanographer who had a perfectly innocent meeting with Taylor, Ford advances the novel proposition before the board that if it wasn't mechanical failure and it wasn't pilot error, then it must have been -- "the supernatural." Yes, girls and boys, FATE is the hunter. What else could have brought all these conditions together -- the flight of birds, the engine failure, the unknown pier, the radio failure -- at exactly the right time and place to cause the accident except -- fate.Actually, you don't have to dig into the supernatural (or reach skyward) for that. It can be explained by a simple and drab deterministic universe. Everything that happens at a given place and time is determined by a multitude of previous events. One thing causes another and every once in a while they come together in a wildly improbable manner to cause something more important than all of them put together. You will sometimes have a perfect accident just as you will sometimes have a "perfect storm." Ford may call it Fate but I'd call it statistical probability.That's a little egg-headed, I know, but the explanation is never explored anyway. It all turns out to have to do with a paper cup of coffee that spilled on Taylor's pedestal when the first engine quit and the airplane jarred momentarily. The coffee dripped into an electrical unit and shorted out some other circuits and caused all sorts of false alarms, to which Taylor unwittingly responded. That was fate in a cup of coffee. Maxwell House, I hope.Harold Medford wrote the screenplay which has practically nothing to do with Ernet K. Gann's superb memoirs with the same title. I imagine Medford being handed the assignment with directions something like this. "We've got the rights to Gann's book. Now make up a story that will fit the title. And we've got Glenn Ford, Nancy Kwan, Dorothy Malone, Susanne Pleshette, Mark Stevens, and some reliable supporting players, so squeeze all of them in. Try to make the story about airplanes." Not much from the book appears in the movie. Sometimes events show up but in altered form. It was Gann who played the concertina, not a friend. And it was Gann who got the garter of the famous lady on the USO tour during the war, only the famous lady wasn't Jane Russell but Marlene Dietrich.Oh, hell. You want a bewitching story about fate and flying? Read the book.