Wings of Courage 1995
Wings of Courage, a 40-minute movie about a downed pilot that starred Craig Sheffer and Val Kilmer, was the first IMAX 3-D fictional film. Reviewing it, The New York Times wrote that "of course" 3-D was not the future of movies, "at least until those headsets turn into something more comfortable."
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1930 -- two legendary French aviation pioneers Jean Mermoz (Val Kilmer) and Antoine de St. Exupery (Tom Hulce), head the Compagnie Générale Aéropostale, the first ever to fly mail between South American cities and France. Mermoz, a daredevil pilot, is a charismatic, astonishingly handsome, French cultural icon -- the future hero of the Atlantic South. St. Exupery, witty, eccentric, intellectual, is a famous writer who will later gain even greater fame as the author of the literary classic, Le Petit Prince. Having he
ard of Henri Guillaumet’s (Craig Sheffer) flying exploits and needing another young pilot to cover the Santiago de Chile/Buenos Aires route, the two famous airmen recruit Henri to fly for them. Henri has two passions in life: flying and his beautiful wife Noëlle (Elizabeth McGovern). The night before Henri’s first mail delivery, Mermoz tells him that the route he will be flying is a treacherous run across the Andes Cordillera range, where the mountains peak at 21,000 feet.
“If you drop, you’ll never be found again,” he says, “remember the local saying: ‘the Andes don’t give men back.’”
Flying the Cordillera, Henri runs into weather problems from the start. On one flight, as St. Exupery is waiting for him to deliver the European mail in Buenos Aires, his biplane is badly damaged by a fierce hail storm. He is forced to turn back to Santiago. Taking Aeropostale’s motto “the mail is more important than life” literally, he takes off again the next morning in a patched-up plane, against worse weather conditions.
Crossing the monumental range with lightning ripping through the clouds, Henri makes a brave attempt at getting through. Bashed by the storm, the plane plummets, and Henri is forced to crash-land on a frozen mountain lake, lost in the Andes, miles from civilization. When a search plane passes by without seeing him, Henri buries the mail in the snow with a marker so it can be located later, and starts his walk through the desolate frozen landscape of the Cordillera. For five days and five nights, Henri courageously carries on his trek, struggling through waist-deep snow and freezing temperatures. The desire to rest by succumbing to death is strong, but proves no match for his love of Noëlle and devotion to duty. Henri keeps walking. At last, he is finally found by a group of Argentine Gauchos who contact St. Exupery and the rescue team.
Ten days later, Henri is back on duty for Aeropostale...flying the mail over the Andes.
"I feel a great deal of respect and friendship towards the actors I worked with WINGS OF COUARGE. They displayed untiring devotion and they generated a lot of enthusiasm on set. I hadn’t been expecting so much courtesy - so much warmth - in the nonetheless, very chilly conditions of the shoot." ~Jean-Jacques Annaud, producer/director