Director – Paul Stanley, Screenplay – Guerdon Trueblood, Producer – Walter Burr, Photography – James Crabe, Music – Paul Glass, Art Direction – Craig Smith. Production Company – Cinema Center 100.
Vince Edwards (Major Michael Devlin), Richard Basehart (Brigadier General Russell Hamner), William Shatner (Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke), Lou Antonio (Tony), Lawrence Casey (Gant), Pat Wayne (Mac), Dennis Cooney (Brandy), Brad David (Elmo), Alan Caillou (Corey)
The US Air Force bomber Home Run has crashed in the Libyan Desert. The five survivors have been waiting seventeen years to be rescued. They are now suddenly spotted by a plane. A US military team headed by Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke is despatched from Washington D.C. to investigate. They bring along with them Brigadier General Russell Hamner, the sole survivor of the crash. As the team arrive at the crash site, the other survivors realise they are dead. Watching the investigation, the ghosts also realise that Hamner is lying in saying that the rest of the crew bailed out with him over the Mediterranean when he in fact abandoned them. From their intangible state, they try to find some way to alert the investigating team about the truth. Gronke wishes to have the matter resolved as quickly as possible and return home, but his second-in-command Major Michael Devlin begins to have doubts about the plausibility of Hamner’s story.
The Deathdream film – wherein an individual experiencing a series of anomalous happenings makes the discovery that they have been dead all along – has become a familiar cliché in the years since Sole Survivor. The theme had been created years before with Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1891) and first appeared on film with Outward Bound (1930) and was popularised with the famous short adaptation of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961). Sole Survivor isn’t quite full deathdream – the dead realise they are early in the show and there is no twist at the ending. Despite such, the film is fascinating to see especially in that it conducts a fresh and original treatment that stands up fifty years later even after the deathdream twist ending has been ground down into a cliché by a horde of tedious copies of The Sixth Sense (1999).
Sole Survivor is one of the most fascinatingly original films I have seen in some time. All of it centres around a plane crash site in the desert. There is one scene in Washington D.C. and a few flashbacks to the fateful plane voyage, but the rest of the film takes place at a single outdoor location (El Mirage Dry Lake in California as opposed to Libya). There the story takes place on two levels – the ghosts of the crew standing around observing and the corporeal investigation going on with the investigators unaware of the dead watching them.
The fascinating set-up has the ghosts aware that Richard Basehart’s survivor is telling a lie but stuck with the problem of how to communicate this to the investigators. The ghosts appear to have some ability to move things about in the real world (although that leaves you wondering why they didn’t write some type of message, even if it was in the sand). The standout script manages to build this into a mystery – a countdown against time as the ghosts try to get the truth across to the living and watching Vince Edwards slowly piece together the holes in Richard Basehart’s story against his superior William Shatner’s indifferent wish to get everything wrapped up as quickly as possible. The writing, the performances of Shatner, Edwards and Basheart are all exceptional, an example where both script and actors work in tandem to create some finely shaded characters.
This would have been one of the first roles that William Shatner played after the cancellation of Star Trek (1966-9). Richard Basehart was best known as the commander in tv’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-8), while Vince Edwards was best known as the lead in tv’s medical drama Ben Casey (1961-6). Playing one of the airmen is Patrick Wayne, the son of John Wayne, who had a minor acting career, most notedly playing the lead in films like The People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).
This was one of the first screenplays from Guerdon Trueblood who has a career mostly in tv. His other scripts included the tv movies The Love War (1970), The Savage Bees (1976), It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977), Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977), Terror Out of the Sky (1978) and Jaws 3-D (1983).
Sole Survivor should not be confused with several other films with the same title including a further air crash survivor deathdeam film Sole Survivor (1983), the Dean R. Koontz tv mini-series Sole Survivor (2000) and a further deathdream film Soul Survivors (2001).
Full film available here