In The Last Flight of Noah's Ark, Schroder plays one of two children who stow away on an old B-29 Superfortress bomber piloted by ne'er-do-well (Elliott Gould) trying to avoid his out-of-control gambling debts. Gould is offered a job transporting a prim missionary (Geneviève Bujold) and some farm animals she raised at her orphanage to a remote mission site. Two of the orphans (Schroder and Tammy Lauren) sneak on board to be sure their animal friends are safe. When the old crate aircraft is forced to make a crash landing on a remote Pacific island, the four have to join forces with a couple of stranded Japanese soldiers from World War II. Their only hope is to turn the downed plane into a seaworthy boat capable of transporting not only the humans but their animal charges (hence the ark reference).
The plot was adapted rather loosely from the story "The Gremlin's Castle" by Ernest K. Gann, whose other aircraft-in-distress tales were made into the movies Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), Fate Is the Hunter (1964), and The Aviator (1985) - the Christopher Reeve adventure, not the Howard Hughes biopic.
This film was a bit of a departure for London-born director Charles Jarrott. Before this film, he was best known for the historical epics Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), which also starred Bujold and Mary, Queen of Scots (1971). Jarrott followed The Last Flight of Noah's Ark immediately with another Disney picture, Condorman (1981).
Location filming took place at a desert airfield near Victorville, California, and at locations in Hawaii. Several aircraft were used for the production, including some scrapped B-29s, one of which had to be greatly modified to make it floatable for the island escape. The plane that actually flew in the picture was a working model nicknamed Fertile Myrtle, used by the Navy to launch rockets from Edwards Air Base between 1951 and 1956.
The film was shot by director of photography Charles F. Wheeler, whose work on an earlier action movie involving military aircraft, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), earned him an Academy Award nomination. The score was composed by no less than Maurice Jarre, who won Oscars for the David Lean period epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1985).
The film was not well received and ended up on a double bill with the re-release of the Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians (1961) with the ad slogan "Treat your family to a Disney summer." Critic Roger Ebert apparently did not find the treat in it, calling The Last Flight of Noah's Ark "a dreadful movie, bankrupt of creative imagination" and "so depressingly predictable."
Director: Charles Jarrott
Producer: Ron Miller, Jan Williams
Screenplay: Sandy Glass and George Arthur Bloom, Steven W. Carabatsos, from the short story "The Gremlin's Castle" by Ernest K. Gann
Cinematography: Charles F. Wheeler
Editing: Gordon D. Brenner
Art Direction: John B. Mansbridge
Music: Maurice Jarre
Cast: Elliott Gould (Noah Dugan), Geneviève Bujold (Bernadette Lafleur), Ricky Schroder (Bobby), Tammy Lauren (Julie), Vincent Gardenia (Stoney)
By Rob Nixon
