The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX  (1965)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Aldrich
    James Stewart, Hardy Krüger, Richard Attenborough,
    Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Bannen,
    Dan Duryea, George Kennedy, Ronald Fraser, 
    Christian Marquand, Gabriele Tinti, Barrie Chase
When a plane without a functioning radio crashes in the Libyan desert, a hundred miles from the nearest waterhole, it looks like slow death for the survivors. Fortunately, there's an aircraft engineer on board who thinks they can build a new plane from the wreckage of the old one and fly it out of there. Unfortunately, he's an arrogant bastard and everybody hates his guts, they're low on water and food, and who would believe they could actually do such a crazy thing, anyway? A gripping, old-fashioned adventure movie that comes down to a battle of wills between Jimmy Stewart as the old-school pilot and Hardy Krüger as the know-it-all engineer. Barrie Chase appears fleetingly as a belly-dancing hallucination, the only woman in the film. Stunt pilot Paul Mantz was killed testing an experimental aircraft during the shoot.