The Flight Of The Phoenix

Robert Aldrich's multi-layered 1965 thriller is a welcome addition to the Masters of Cinema series. It comes with a dense, informative and nicely illustrated booklet which will appeal to collectors. There's also an interview with film historian Sheldon Hall, who goes into a similar level of depth in discussing the film and placing it in its proper historical context. To counterpoint all this intellectual material, there's the original trailer, which does its level best to ignore the film's plot and convince you it's about explosions, fighting and seductive dancers - an interesting illustration of the lengths gone to in order to sell a film which, whilst it might not be natural audience bait, has stood the test of time much better than its more popular peers.