Saw this for the 1st time this past weekend on TCM. Was able to get within 30 minutes or so of the end before I had to leave. How does it end? Honey had sabotaged the plan and was starting to deal with the management of the airline, etc when I turned it off.
shareSPOILERS! (In case someone didn't pay attention to the thread's title!)
I may be repeating some things you saw, but....
Miss Teasdale returns to England and takes a brief interest in Honey's professional well-being as well as his personal life -- his daughter and the stewardess, Marjorie, who moves into Honey's house to take care of Ellspeth and then Honey for a while. Honey finds his work has been taken away from him and while the tests on the Reindeer tail continue, they eventually pass his 1440 hour mark and the tail doesn't fall off.
Honey returns to his house, and as he talks with both Marjorie and his daughter Honey suddenly comes to grips with the reality of people's lives. He realizes Ellspeth's life is unhappy, and that he can't just give in and let his principles be destroyed, that he has to stand up for himself as an engineer and understand his failings as a father and as a human being.
A hearing is held at which the airline chairman denounces Honey. He demands Honey be fired and branded a lunatic. Honey interrupts, resigns from the Establishment (the manufacturer, Royal Aircraft Establishment, which was a real, nationalized, aircraft firm), and announces that every time a Reindeer is about to take off, he'll go out and wreck it; they may put him in jail, but he'll get publicity and people "just won't get on those airplanes." He goes home, tells Marjorie what he's done, and she decides to marry him and take care of him and Ellspeth.
Back at the airline company, Honey's superiors (actors Ronald Squire and Jack Hawkins) are leaving when they're given a message from Labrador that the tail of the crashed Reindeer has been found and it is a fatigue fracture. The chairman of the airline then comes up to them and says he's received word from Gander that the repaired Reindeer Honey had wrecked had made a test flight around the airport, landed safely, and that the tail had fallen off as it was taxiing to the hangar -- thus vindicating Honey.
Squire, Hawkins and Glynis Johns (Marjorie) all rush to the hangar where Honey's Reindeer tail is still being pounded. Honey is packing up. They tell him his theory has been proven, but all he's concerned with is why the test tail in the hangar hasn't fallen off. Just then it suddenly cracks and collapses. Honey sees a thermometer dangling on the wall and realizes that since the two planes whose tails did fall off had first flown in the tropics, if he had adjusted the temperature in the shed his tail would also have collapsed on schedule. The End.
Watch it all next time anyway. By the way, you saw it on FMC, not TCM (as did I, for the umpteenth time -- great film!).
Thanks, hobnob53. Great recap. JS is the best and it was an added treat to see MD and JH.
shareYou're welcome, and I agree with your assessments of those actors.
I've often wondered about whether the Reindeer's flight crew, who had been so hostile to Honey even before he wrecked the plane, would have gone en masse to visit him upon hearing that their plane's tail had collapsed after its post-repair test flight, apologized, and thanked him for saving their lives. (And whether Monica heard about it too.) That would have been a neat scene.
Wonderful recap!
Just to clarify the temperature issue -- Honey realizes that the delay of the tails falling off in the tropics, as in his test, was due to the temperature being 40 degrees higher than that for the plane whose crash occured in Labrador. If he had kept the testing site 40 degrees lower he would have hit his 1440 hour target....
Thank you -- and your recap of the temperature aspect is quite right.
Also, the most recent showing was on TCM -- a first. FMC had been the only channel previously to run this great film uncut and unedited.
Can we ever expect a DVD?