Leofwine_draca THE NIGHT MY NUMBER CAME UP is a disaster film with a difference; it opens with Michael Hordern having a frightening dream, or perhaps a premonition, of a plane crash-landing on the north coast of Japan. The film that goes back in time to recount the events of a fateful trip, in which a motley group of passengers find themselves on a seemingly disaster-bound flight. This is a neat thriller which feels much like the FINAL DESTINATION of its day, although better plotted and acted. Michael Redgrave headlines the cast in a typically refined and likable performance, but nobody here puts a foot wrong, really, and all of the assembled actors give strong performances. It's one of those quiet suspense thrillers that nonetheless grips you from beginning to end, so that you're absolutely riveted come the inevitable climax. Another winner from Ealing, in other words.

malcolmgsw It seems to me that in making this film they were trying to replicate past successes with The Halfway House and Dead of Night.Part of the problem with this film is because we are given the details of Michael Horse's dream at the beginning we know what is going to happen so there is not a great deal of suspense.It also seems as if the producers are giving the plane every conceivable problem.The radio fails,the cabin is not pressurised and there is no radar.It seems almost inconceivable that the plane would have no radar,and that the navigator was so incompetent that the aircraft would be flying around in circles.Entertaining but no classic.

Charlot47 Based on a true story, this follows a group of VIPs in 1947 flying from Hong Kong to Tokyo in an RAF Dakota, which develops problems and in a snow storm at night with the radio gone has to crash land on the rugged empty north-east coast of Japan. The last dramatic minutes of the increasingly uneasy trip had been exactly foreseen in a dream that was recounted by a guest at a dinner party before they left. Tension mounts relentlessly from the moment the doomed flight begins. Anybody who has any fear of flying should on no account watch this film.Michael Redgrave as the chief protagonist, Air Marshal Hardie, dominates the film with his strong presence. Both Alexander Knox as a senior civil servant who has never flown before and Sheila Sim as a secretary, the only woman on the fated plane, are still in trauma from a Japanese internment camp. Denholm Elliott is a Battle of Britain hero whose nerve has gone and George Rose is a brash Birmingham businessman. Michael Hordern, not on the flight, is the naval officer who had the alarming dream. Nigel Stock, pilot of the Dakota, has some issues to contend with and there are cameos for Bill Kerr and Alfie Bass as a pair of comic squaddies.Decent script by R C Sheriff, of "Journey's End" and "Goodbye, Mr Chips" fame, which catches well the clichés, hesitations and understatements in which the English conversed at the time. Among these are the ambiguities surrounding the relationship with Asian people and the degree to which British civil servants and businessmen ever understood them. Not intended, maybe, but there is also a strong air of End of Empire. Though the British had regained their eastern footholds in 1945, their day was over and the locals knew it. No more would the British be the master race, commercially or militarily, for despite brave talk they now depended on American might. The conference to which the party in the plane is going was presumably chaired by Americans, who were attempting to redraw the map of Asia in their style. The starting point and symbol of this new era was the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened by American nuclear bombs. Ironically, the prime reason for the eventual crash of the Dakota is that the Air Marshal, for professional and historical reasons, uses up precious fuel by diverting to overfly the devastation. Even more ironically, both cities are hidden by cloud, so the fuel is completely wasted.

Sturgeon54 On display is one of the greatest scenarios ever presented in film - a flight over the Orient of which an anonymous British officer has had a dream premonition of disaster. What is so great about this idea and how it was executed here is that the dream itself is simply a catalyst for a psychological probing of the behavior of the passengers once they learn one-by-one about the particulars of the dream and how these particulars are playing out in their real flight. The theme then becomes the old-as-Shakespeare literary idea of fate vs. free will, but the strength of the filmmakers is that it is never resolved conclusively in the end. Even when the characters do hint at not letting a particular passenger on board the plane because this passenger has been prophesized to be an integral part of the disaster, they take no serious action to remove him, instinctively realizing that even that may not give them greater control over the situation.The contrast of a modern technological artifice such as an aircraft with an archaic-style premonition is so brilliant because it portrays the ultimate paradox of human technological evolution: the farther human beings advance in their technological feats of control, paradoxically, the greater their lives are placed in the hands of the gods (fate) with all the many ways in which that technology can go tragically awry. For a simple idea, the filmmakers were obviously thinking, and they have added multiple layers to the story. "Night My Number Came Up" is a film I hope to see many times to pick up some themes I missed the first time. Like paintings, writing, and other forms of art, I believe that it is this characteristic which distinguishes great art from all the rest.