The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

Richard Attenborough: Lew Moran

Photos 

Quotes 

• Lew Moran : It may not be the best possible advertisement. but Frank Towns is probably one of the few really great pilots left in this push-button world of yours.

  Heinrich Dorfmann : Oh, really?

  Lew Moran : [angrily]  Yes, 'Oh, really!' He was flying by the seat of his pants in planes that were nothing more than bits and pieces before you even went to school!

  Heinrich Dorfmann : That's precisely what is wrong - he has remembered everything and learned nothing!

• Lew Moran : I don't know what your practical navigation's like, but mine's not bad. I wouldn't march ten paces from here. In the daytime it's hitting a hundred and twenty in the shade, and out there, there is no shade.

• Lew Moran : You told Towns he was behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. If he's making it into a virtue, YOU'RE MAKING IT INTO A BLOODY SCIENCE!

• Lew Moran : If you marched a hundred and six miles by the stars and your calculations were just one per cent out, you could pass the Eiffel Tower in daylight and never even see it.

• Frank Towns : I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.

  Lew Moran : All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.

• Lew Moran : [of an alternate destination]  Three stinkin' mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease.

• Lew Moran : Maybe Frank Towns, who's flown every crate they've ever built and could fly in and out of a tennis court if he had to, maybe that great hell-for-leather trailblazer's nothing more than a back number now. And maybe men like Dorfmann can build machines that can do Frank Towns's job for him, and do it better

• Lew Moran : We can die here or we can die in that thing. What's the matter? Haven't you any curiosity left? Wouldn't you like to know how it feels to fly a toy aeroplane?