Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Night Crossing

“Based on a true story” is not a phrase typically associated with Walt Disney Productions. Walt would occasionally dabble in historical dramas, as in Johnny Tremain, The Great Locomotive Chase and the utterly dire Ten Who Dared. But he very much subscribed to the “Print The Legend” school of historical accuracy. Davy Crockett, for example, would have been surprised to hear about his adventures bringing the River Pirates to justice. His tastes also ran more toward the history books than the newspapers. The closest his studio had come to making a movie based on current events was the wartime docu-ganda (propa-mentary?) Victory Through Air Power.

That changed on September 16, 1979, when two families, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, made a daring escape from East Germany via a homemade hot air balloon. The incident made headlines around the world. As soon as it did, producer Tom Leetch, who had also been responsible for bringing The Watcher In The Woods to the studio, took a meeting with studio head Ron Miller, urging him to secure the film rights to the story.

Disney was not the only studio interested in making the movie but they did have a few advantages. For one thing, both families had kids and they had fond memories of watching Disney movies on West German television (the movie includes a brief nod to this tradition of tuning in to illicit TV signals). Maybe more importantly, they had Disneyland. The studio arranged to interview the eight escapees in Southern California. In their downtime, they were given VIP treatment at the Happiest Place on Earth. With four kids involved, nobody else stood a chance.

Perhaps as a sign that Disney intended to treat the project with respect, Leetch and Miller dug a little deeper than the usual numbers they had on speed-dial to find a writer and director. Screenwriter John McGreevey had an extensive resume in both film and television, winning an Emmy for his work on The Waltons. He was also the father of Michael McGreevey, our old buddy Schuyler from the Dexter Riley trilogy. This would be John McGreevey’s only Disney film, although he would later channel some of his Disney knowledge into the script for the 1995 TV biopic A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes: The Annette Funicello Story.

With an Emmy-winner writing the screenplay, Disney aimed even higher and found an Oscar-winner to direct. Delbert Mann started in television and won the Academy Award as Best Director for his first feature, Marty, in 1955. It’s fair to say he peaked early. Mann made some decent movies after Marty, including Separate Tables and The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs, but he never quite distinguished himself as a singular filmmaker. This would be Mann’s last film to receive a wide theatrical release. He continued to work in television until his retirement in 1994. He’d return to Disney in 1984 to direct the Disney Channel obscurity Love Leads The Way, a TV-movie about the first seeing-eye dog.

At first, the project was simply known as The Balloon Movie. Once McGreevey started to put his script together, he landed on the title The Last Flight To Freedom. Since Disney had just released a movie called The Last Flight Of Noah’s Ark, they decided to keep looking. Wind To The West was briefly considered before they finally settled on the short but sweet Night Crossing. Clearly, they made the right choice.

The studio continued to aim high when assembling the cast. John Hurt, who played Peter Strelzyk, was not the first, second or even fiftieth actor one would typically associate with live action Disney movies. Hurt’s breakthrough role had been in the 1966 Oscar winner A Man For All Seasons. Since then, he’d built a reputation as an actor’s actor, receiving Academy Award nominations for Midnight Express and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (not to mention a chest-bursting appearance in Alien). If Disney wanted to let audiences know Night Crossing was different from their usual fare, casting John Hurt was a good start.

The rest of the cast was equally impressive. Peter’s wife, Doris, was played by Jane Alexander, a three-time Oscar nominee (for The Great White Hope, All The President’s Men and Kramer Vs. Kramer) on her way to a fourth (for Testament). Hollywood royalty Beau Bridges costarred as Peter’s partner, Günter Wetzel (his younger brother, Jeff, was also employed by Disney at the time, working on a movie we’ll get to very soon). And Günter’s wife, Petra, was played by Glynnis O’Connor, who had costarred with Robby Benson in the popular romances Jeremy and Ode To Billy Joe.

Night Crossing wastes no time establishing its Cold War setting, with a little pre-credits history lesson on the Berlin Wall and an opening sequence featuring a young man collecting signatures condemning a recently jailed dissident. Peter runs an independent contractor’s service, employing his old friends Günter and Josef Keller (Ian Bannen, who coincidentally just played the similarly named John Keller in The Watcher In The Woods). They long to escape to the West but the realities of coordinating such a journey with their wives and children in tow make it an impossible dream.

Things change when Josef’s teenage son, Lucas (Matthew Taylor), steals a bulldozer and makes a nighttime break that ends with his death. As the authorities round up the Kellers for questioning, Peter realizes they can no longer stay in East Germany. He proposes constructing a hot-air balloon. After some convincing, Günter agrees to help design and build the airship. But Petra is sure that the attempt is doomed to failure, constantly fretting about being discovered by their nosy neighbor (Irene Prador). The stress eventually gets to her and she forces Günter to drop out of the project.

Peter continues his work, assisted by his oldest son, Frank (Doug McKeon, best known at the time for playing Jane Fonda’s son in On Golden Pond…his real-life brother, Keith, plays his on-screen brother, Fitscher). Together, they get the balloon inflated and seemingly ready to go. But Peter doesn’t want to wait and risk discovery, so he hurriedly sets their escape without making a real test. On their first escape attempt, the Strelzyk family almost make it out before a cloud forces them down, landing within the heavily patrolled border zone. They’re able to make it back to their car on foot and safely back home but the balloon itself drifts to the perimeter, where it’s sent to Berlin as evidence.

Peter is understandably discouraged but his family encourages him to try again. Günter is also back on board, now with the tentative support of Petra. Her mother has fallen ill in West Berlin and the authorities have refused to allow her a pass to visit her. However, the East German police, led by the relentless Major Koerner (Günter Meisner, who you may recognize as Mr. Slugworth from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory) are tirelessly working to discover who constructed the first balloon. Because of their efforts, Peter and Günter are forced to purchase the necessary taffeta for the balloon in much smaller quantities. Koerner also discovers a clue in the woods where the family landed: a bottle of prescription hypertension medication accidentally dropped by Doris.

Koerner tracks the medication back to the pharmacy, forcing the unwilling pharmacist to laboriously go through his records to find the addresses of everyone on this common drug on the very night the two families plan to make their escape. With the dragnet tightening, the Strelzyks and Wetzels flee the city, once again launching their balloon in the dead of night. And because this movie exists, you can probably figure out for yourself whether or not they made it.

Night Crossing is not an entirely successful movie but it’s kind of an interesting one. To the credit of all involved, it does not necessarily feel like a Disney version of history. However, it very much feels like a Hollywood version, meaning that all of the tropes and cliches that plague this type of movie were endemic to pretty much all movies like this at the time, not just Disney. The dialogue is obviously entirely in English and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys by their accents. Good Germans have English or American accents. Bad Germans have German accents. It’s the kind of movie that tries to establish its setting simply by having the kids refer to their parents as “Pa Pa” and “Ma Ma”.

Mann is able to mine a surprising amount of suspense out of such low-key activities as late-night sewing marathons and the tedious cross-checking of index cards. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much to be done with a balloon escape. It’s an inherently slow and quiet process. Still, Hurt brings a tortured intensity to his role and Jerry Goldsmith’s score helps to remind us of the stakes involved. It’s also a handsomely mounted production with impressive production design by Rolf Zehetbauer (an Oscar winner for Cabaret), some decent visual effects and nice cinematography by Tony Imi. It falls short of being a top-flight drama but nobody needs to be embarrassed about having this one on their filmography, either.

Night Crossing was released on February 5, 1982, to very little acclaim and tepid box office. On its first weekend, it was soundly beaten by McKeon’s earlier film, On Golden Pond. By the end of the year, it barely managed to pull in $8 million, a couple less than it had cost to make. In comparison, it did slightly better than Partners, John Hurt’s gay cop buddy movie with Ryan O’Neal, which probably should be considered an embarrassment on his filmography.

Disney still didn’t have any idea how to connect with a more mature audience. Night Crossing wasn’t a bad attempt but it needed to be a whole lot more interesting and distinguished to set itself apart. Instead, Mann’s movie simply fell into the trap of every other colorless Hollywood docudrama. Proving they could compete with other studios by producing a movie every bit as dull and uninvolving as everyone else was probably not what they’d had in mind.

VERDICT: Disney Minus, albeit a relatively minor one compared to some.

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