Back from Eternity (RKO, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday I put on Turner Classic Movies for a 1956 film made by RKO called Back to Eternity, a remake of a 1939 film called Five Came Back. This was during the period in which RKO was suffering from a sort of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder after the seven years (1948 to 1955) during which Howard Hughes owned it. Hughes had sold the company in 1955 and the new owners, General Tire and Rubber (an early example of the sort of “comglomeratization” that became all the rage in the 1960’s in which companies started buying other companies whether they had any idea how to run them or not; the idea was that with scientific management principles any company could run any other company whether the people in charge had any idea of how that business model worked, which caused some spectacular flame-outs in the 1970’s and 1980’s, notably at the most famous conglomerate of all, International Telegraph and Telephone [ITT]), thought they’d make their money back by remaking old RKO movies and selling RKO’s catalogue to television, the first major studio to do that. Within three years General Tire and Rubber begged off on making movies and sold RKO’s physical plant to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz for their production company, Desilu.

Back from Eternity was a personal project of director John Farrow, husband of Maureen O’Sullivan and father of Mia Farrow, who had directed the original Five Came Back 17 years earlier. The original had featured Cheser Morris in the lead role of an airline pilot whose heavy drinking has him on the thin edge of alcoholism, though without going over, and as the female lead the studio cast Lucille Ball in the first of her hard-edged “dame” performances. (Lucille Ball’s film work has a surprising variety and range, especially to someone who’s only seen her as Lucy Ricardo and the other offshoots of that character she played on her subsequent TV series. She could play tough girls and bitches with equal facility to her comic roles.) In Back from Eternity Morris’s role was played by Robert Ryan and Ball’s by Anita Ekberg, whom RKO ballyhooed as the next Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman. Ekberg would make one truly great film, La Dolce Vita, because Federico Fellini was its director and he was able to use Ekberg’s beauty and near-total lack of acting skills to his advantage. (Ekberg worked for Fellini again in “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” one of the three episodes of the 1962 Italian compilation film Boccaccio ‘70.)

In Back from Eternity Ryan plays Bill Lonagan, captain of an airliner for the fictitious “Pan-Latino Airways” (during the time Howard Hughes owned RKO all airliners had to be from TWA since Hughes also owned TWA at the time; now that Hughes was gone they could use a fictitious name for the airline; it was obviously supposed to be Pan American Airways but Pan American was owned by Juan Trippe, and he and Hughes were bitter enemies), that is charged with flying a plane to the fictitious resort town of “Boca Grande” ini Panama. The story features the usual motley crew of passengers, including Rena (Anita Ekberg), mistress of a rich man who’s tired of her (we notice when she shows up at his home and two other women are already there) and has decided that since Europe and America are both too hot for her he’ll ship her off to Central America for work as a B-girl and likely a prostitute for a mysterious woman whom he says is his aunt. (Lonagan recognized the name of the establishment at once and warned her not to take the job there.) There’s a chilling scene in which her foirmer, shall we say, patron, Paul (Tristram Coffin), in which he systematically and quite violently pulls off her arms all the bracelets and other expensive jewelry he’s given her over the years,though interestingly he lets her keep the white fur coat she wears all movie.

She gets on the plane to Boca Grande along with an exotic mix of characters including Vasquel (Rod Steiger), an international criminal who’s wanted for murder (he shot at the corrupt dictator in a Latin American country, missed him but hit and killed his minister of war); Crimp (Fred Clark), the bounty hunter who captured him and is hoping to collect a reward from the government that wants to execute him; engaged couple Jud Ellis (Gene Barry) and Louise Melhom (Phyllis Kirk), who sqpabble throughout most of e trip; Professor Henry Spangler (Caqmeron Prud’Homme) and his wife Martha (Beulah Bondi); and a boy, Tommy Malone, Jr. (Jon Provoist), whose gangster father has just been killed back in the states. Alas, the plane is forced down and has to make a landing in the middle of headhunter country, and Captain Lonagan and his considerably less inebriated co-pilot, Joe Brooks (Keith Andes, who should have become a major star – he’s both incredibly sexy and a skilled actor, and he had the sort of film debut most actors would drool over: as Marilyn Monroe’s husband in the 1952 thriller Clash by Night, directed byFritz Lang from a script by Clifford Odets, and also starring Robert Ryan, Paul Douglas and the great Barbara Stanwyck), have to figure out how to repair the plane so it can take off again and they can escape the headhunters.

Back from Eternity is 97 minutes long (the original Five Came Back was just 75 minutes) and it was shot in black-and-white wide-screen at a time when Hollywood’s most prestigious productions were being filmed in color (though it would take another decade or so for color to become so standard that a filmmaker who wanted to use black-and-white for artistic effect was bound to get noticed simply because the monochrome medium had become retro). It’s actually a well-done movie, with a stern performance by Robert Ryan as a man whose humanity overcomes his incipient addiction as he’s forced to become a commanding figure as he struggles to keep his crew and passengers alive and restore the functionality of his plane. The rest of the cast is also good except for Ekberg – RKO’s publicity for the film compared her to Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, but about all they had in common was they were all Swedish (though Ekberg’s most famous film was made in Italy and she retired there and died in Italy in 2019).

For some reason, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve described before as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) seemed to think it was highly unusual for a director to remake his own movie – though Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and William Wyler all directed more than one version of the same stories. (DeMille made two versions of The Ten Commandments; Hitchcock two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much; Capra did two self-remales – Riding High, a remake of Broadway Bill; and A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of Lady for a Day; and Wyler did a de-Gayed version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour as These Three in 1936 and 26 years later did a more faithful adaptation under the original title and with the original Lesbian theme.) I quite liked Back from Eternity and it made me wish for a chance to see the original Five Came Back again (I’m sure I’ve seen it, but not since the 1970’s, though I remember it as good and would love to see it again, especially for Chester Morris and the dramatic Lucille Ball).

The original movie had better writers – the screenplay credits included Nathaniel West and Dalton Trumbo, while this version was written by Jonathan Latimer, both based on a story by The Most Dangerous Game author Richard Connell – but both lead up to a climax in which Lonagan and Brooks realize that the restored plane doesn’t have enough fuel pressure to make it over the mountains with all the survivors aboard, and they delegate to Vasquel (played by Rod Steiger in a typically schticky performance from him, though he’d develop more authority later) the task of picking who stays and who goes, Ironically, TCM was showing this as part of an 85th anniversary tribute to the destruction of the German dirigible Hindenburg, which was struck by lightning and blew up as it was trying to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey. TCM’s programmers decided to commemorate this catastrophe by showing a night’s worth of movies about aircraft disasters, including the 1976 Hindenburg movie (which was mostly in color, though to spare themselves the task of reproducing the accident they simply used the famous newsreel footage of the original, even though the newsreel was in black-and-white and, since colorization hadn’t been invented yet, they just spliced in the black-and-white footage into an otherwise color movie) and Zero Hour!, the 1957 serious air-disaster drama Jerry Zucker famously spoofed in the 1980 comedy Airplane!