This lavish production, beautifully filmed in CinemaScope, moves easily between comedy and drama.

Seen today, this lavish aviation drama falls squarely between Stagecoach and Airport, a large ensemble drama about a mechanical crisis on a Honolulu-to-San Francisco flight where every passenger has a story...

All of this nullifies any possibility of intellectual depth and is in fact only a foolish privileging of character analysis over any other kind.

It is perhaps inappropriate to come down too hard on this movie, which has, despite everything, the advantage of being rather well acted, and which is definitely well directed.