Pilot Richard Van Ness gets entangled in a web of smugglers and counterfeiters, but his greatest fight is against his own wartime brain injury. Terence Fisher’s direction is flat and uninspired, allowing the actors to speak their lines but not “act” them, and visually the film is as forgettable as a dream upon waking. The one interesting detail is that future Hammer Director John Gilling wrote the screenplay.
Richard Van Ness (Zachary Scott) is a Commercial Pilot whose roguish best friend Nick Talbot (Robert Beatty) blackmails him into allowing Nick to fly during a storm; with friends like that, who needs enemies? Seems Van suffers from random blackouts, and he’d lose his pilot's license, which seems like a good idea. They get in an argument and Van says he only transports cargo, so if he crashes only property will be lost. Doesn’t he fucking think for a moment that he could crash over a city or village, that innocent people on the ground may die? His blackouts are a dirty secret that he even keeps from his paramour Avril Talbot (Naomi Chance) who is Nick’s sister, which is the underlying reason he won’t marry her. So, Van couldn’t settle for another career in the airline industry or Avril’s hotel business as he’d rather risk catastrophe than give up his license. And this is the guy we’re supposed to have sympathy for!
Now, the blackout idea sounds like a setup for an exciting, thrilling chase scene later in the film as Van would chase the bad guys in a death-defying flight towards the denouement...but nope. We don’t get his first blackout episode until late in the second act when he’s driving a car and chasing a motorcycle. But by this point there’s a police inspector who thinks Van may be involved in smuggling, Nick is presumed dead in airplane crash (hence the first act, his flying in a storm), and a tepid femme fatale Alexia LaRoche (Kay Kendall) who has a notebook full of incriminating evidence (and is being blackmailed herself), and a toolkit made of solid gold. Then there’s something about a Nazi printing press and counterfeit money. Of course, Nick’s alive and involved in this black-market morass yet he saves Van before dying (for real, this time). The ambiguous bad guys escape in a plane without warming up their engines and now we expect a high stakes action sequence. Van will race to his plane, his headaches will increase, we’ll get some nice POV fuzzy compositions as his eyesight blurs, the bad guys will get almost get away before they crash and burn, and Van is the hero. Nope. Our protagonists are busy calling every airport where the plane may possibly land before they hear the engines buzz and see a bright flash: the plane has crashed. See, the engines weren’t warmed up first, right? In the next scene Van is on the runway talking to another pilot but there is no debris or body parts strewn about, no smoking wreckage, not even one single emergency vehicle or mention of the crash that just happened. It’s unintentionally hilarious. I suppose it all ends well for Van but not so well for the Talbot family. I’ve written more words about this film than it deserves.
Final Grade: (D)
