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	Five Came Back Chester Morris, Lucille Ball Turner Home Entertainment, 2002 average customer review:based on 5 reviews
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highly recommended

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The film is not as predictable as you might think. Spoilers follow...

What a powerful ending!

Who could have seen the twist coming when Vasquez alone picks those who live and those who die. I watched the film assuming it would turn out to be a "lifeboat" situation, full of justifications and categorizations. Instead, Vasquez chooses based on logic and morality. This would be a wonderful conversation starter!

And the surprises just kept coming -- I audibly gasped when we see only two bullets in the gun. I suppose there is a concept, then, that justice is finally served as Vasquez alone is left to the hands of the natives.

Frankly I didn't think Peggy (Lucy) had a chance of surviving as the woman with a questionable reputation, and yet she redeems herself when she becomes Tommy's mother.

My only gripe with the film is that it ends prematurely, literally with their fate up in the air. We have to assume they all make it back safely, but even a quick sequence of the plane landing or even seeing safety ahead would have sufficed. Perhaps the director and writers were telling us that the real drama was not on the plane at the end but on the ground. Is Vasquez the central character then? I'll have to watch it again and think about it some more.

Full of complex characters and wonderful performances, "Five Came Back" is a classic worth watching again!

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Survival in the jungle

"Five Came Back" was an entertaining grade B 1939 production featuring a 27 year old Lucille Ball in an expanded role for her as gal of questionable repute Peggy Nolan. Ball was among a group of 12 passengers aboard an airplane flying from California by way of Mexico to Panama City.

During a severe tropical storm the pilot played by Chester Morris and co-pilot played by Kent Smith are forced to crash land in the remote Central American jungle. The group are compelled to cooperate to survive the rigors of the environment and to repair the plane to fly it out of it's confinement. The group including C. Aubrey Smith as a professor and Joseph Calleia as a prisoner escorted by malcontent detective John Carradine help make life tolerable.

When repairs are completed, the plane is too damaged to manage to fly with a full payload. Only five passengers will be able to escape out of the jungle just as the unseen natives brandishing poison darts are closing in. But who will be chosen?

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Belle of The Ball or Lucy You Look Marvelous!!!!!

Fun film to watch. I love the old B&W films so this was right up my alley. This is the first movie I have seen where Lucille Ball was so young and I thought she was beautiful. The year was 1939 so it was before she met Desi. One thing that struck about this film is that everyone, even the murderer HAD MANNERS. They were decent to the people they met, not like the world today. The screenplay is by Dalton Trumbo (before he was blacklisted by Hollywood) and is rather good (written almost 70 years ago). I hope they produce a DVD of this film. Hey Techncolor Tessey, you never looked more lovely!!!! check it out

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5 Came Back: The Best of the B's

Hollywood occasionally tells the tale of a group of travellers stuck within an enclosed arena against which they must contend with opposition externally and internally. In 5 CAME BACK, director John Farrow places some surprisingly well-known actors (Lucille Ball, John Carradine, Chester Morris, and C. Aubrey Smith)in an airplane that is caught in a storm and crash lands in the head-hunter jungles of Brazil. What makes this film click is the unexpectedly successful melding of fine acting with a gloomy and dense jungle backdrop that serves to bring out the best and the worst of the passengers. Lucille Ball is a floozy that nevertheless can rise to the challenge of surviving in a forest and still look good enough to find romance with the co-pilot. John Carradine plays Crimp the bounty-hunter who determines to bring in his prisoner for the reward. But the one who steals the show is veteran character actor C. Aubrey Smith, who has made a career of playing the distinguished English upper crust gentleman who knows how to die with the same style as how to live. This is no film of special effects; in fact one can even see the blatant rubber undersides of the planted "trees" against which the head-hunters appear from the ankles down. 5 CAME BACK is however the ancestor of such future films as STAGECOACH and THE BREAKFAST CLUB. What makes movies like this resonate even with the cheesiness of the production values is the odd way that locked in strangers must confront their inner demons even as they must face their outer ones. 5 CAME BACK is a fine example of this genre.

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