After the 'disaster film' genre came of age in the 1970s, one of the most suspenseful elements was determining who would survive and who would die in the course of the adventure. However, at the time The High and the Mighty (1954) was made, it was all but unheard of that non-villainous characters in peril - particularly women and children - should perish. With death off the table, the screenplay resorted to extended flashbacks into the passengers' private lives, and it is for this that the film has sustained its greatest criticism over the course of time. Some of the flashbacks are comic, others poignant, but all of them are wholly irrelevant to the essential plight of an airplane bound for a crash landing and, even more detrimental, they break the suspense by allowing the audience to leave the entrapped environment. For modern-day viewers, particularly those steeped in 1970s disaster films, the flashback sequences lend a jarring, incongruous note to the otherwise genre-faithful proceedings.

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