F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1933)

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is a 1933 Anglo-French-German co-production. Intriguingly three different versions were shot with three different casts, one version in English, one in German and one in French. The English and German versions survive. This review deals with the English-language version.

It’s also interesting in having been co-written by Curt Siodmak, brother of the great director Robert Siodmak. Curt Siodmak went on to great success as a science fiction novelist and screenwriter (he wrote The Wolf Man).

The F.P.1 is the brainchild of Captain Droste (Leslie Fenton). It’s not an aircraft carrier but a giant floating aerodrome which will be moored in mid-Atlantic. At that time commercial airliners were small and did not have the range to make oceanic crossings non-stop so while the idea sounds odd it did make some kind of sense in 1933.

The movie begins with a burglary that is not what it seems. The burglar is Droste’s buddy Major Ellissen (Conrad Veidt), a famed aviator.

As a result of the burglary that isn’t Ellison meets Claire Lennartz (Jill Esmond). She owns the shipyard that will eventually construct the F.P.1.

There are mysterious plots afoot to sabotage the F.P.1.

A romantic triangle develops between Claire, Droste and Ellison. Both men are hopelessly in love with her. She’s attracted to both men but it starts to look like she will marry Droste.

Two years later the F.P.1 is ready to being operations and then things start to go wrong. It seems that the sabotage attempts have been resumed.

Eventually Claire has to set out on a rescue mission to save the man she loves, Droste. She persuades Ellison to fly the rescue plane. He agrees, because he’s too decent a guy to refuse.

This sets up some decent suspense as attempts are made to save F.P.1 and its crew and the romantic triangle comes to a head.

Leslie Fenton and Jill Esmond were fairly big names in Britain at the time and they’re both good. They give their characters at least a small amount of depth. Droste is a visionary, a driven man, perhaps too much so. Claire is caught between two men and she really doesn’t want to hurt either one. She’s trying not to succumb to the temptation to play them off against each other.

Conrad Veidt is the acting heavyweight here and he’s extremely good. Ellison is a complex man. At first he’s arrogant and ambitious and then, on a long-distance flight, he crashes. He seems to lose all his confidence. His life starts to fall apart. He’s a tortured man but he’s fundamentally decent.

This is borderline science fiction, made at a time when science fiction films were few and far between. I say borderline because the technology is all basically early 1930s. Even F.P.1 itself is probably not something wildly beyond the technology of the time, assuming someone was willing to spend vast amounts of money. It might be more accurate to describe this as a techno-thriller.

While the 1930s aircraft and the crazy floating platform are fun the real focus is on the the three key characters and the interactions between them. Most of all it’s the story of a man who has lost himself. Maybe he will have one last chance to find himself again.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is an oddity but I like interesting oddities and I liked this movie. Recommended.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is now available on Blu-Ray from Kino Classics. I don’t know if the Blu-Ray includes the German-language version as well.

Fate is the Hunter (1964)

Fate is the Hunter, released in 1964, is a kind of aviation disaster movie (a favourite genre of mine) and also a kind of mystery. And fate may or may not be a crucial factor.

An airliner crashes a few minutes after taking off from Los Angeles. 53 passengers and crew are killed. Due to a couple of unexpected misfortunes the cause of the crash is not easy to determine. The aircraft’s flight recorder was destroyed. There are audio tapes of messages passed between the doomed airliner and ground control but the messages end at a vital moment, apparently due to a radio failure. The evidence, such as it is, is ambiguous.

The airline’s flight director, Sam McBane (Glenn Ford), believes that the pilot is, quite unfairly, going to be blamed.

There is evidence that one of the aircraft’s two engines exploded. That evidence is strong but not absolute. There is some evidence that the second engine failed as well but the evidence for that is more shaky.

So much of the evidence is not merely ambiguous but puzzling. The second engine was later found to be entirely undamaged but a survivor insists that both cockpit warning lights were on, indicating failure of both engines. That survivor is one of the stewardesses, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette). Martha is a sensible young woman. She is an experienced stewardess and is therefore perfectly well aware of the meaning of the cockpit warning lights. As a stewardess she has been trained to keep her head in a crisis. She did not suffer any head injuries. There is no reason to think that she was likely to be confused or in a panic. Sam is very much inclined to believe her story even though it conflicts with other evidence.

This was 1964, a time when flying was still glamorous and exciting. ln those happy days airliners had no flight attendants. They had stewardesses. The stewardesses were pretty, because having pretty airline stewardesses made flying seem more glamorous. They were well-trained and extremely competent. They just happened to be pretty as well. It is clear that Martha Webster is very good at her job and very professional.

The worrying thing is the suggestion that the pilot, Jack Savage (Rod Taylor), may have been drinking shortly before the flight. Sam does not believe this could have been the case. On the other hand we have to take into account Sam’s fierce loyalty to his pilots, and the fact that he and the pilot were old friends. He had been Jack’s co-pilot during the war. To complicate things, Sam’s attitude towards Jack is a bit ambivalent - a mixture of hero-worship and disapproval. Sam considers Jack to have been an outstanding pilot, but perhaps less outstanding as a man.

This movie was made at a fascinating time in Hollywood history. The Production Code was crumbling rapidly. The studios were tentatively experimenting with a radical new concept - making movies that took a grown-up attitude towards sex. Jack’s sex life becomes an important plot point. He sees to have shared his bed with a succession of attractive young ladies. If a decision is made to cast Jack as the scapegoat the newspapers will certainly suggest that he was a man of dubious sexual morals, and they are likely to suggest that a man with such a deplorable lack of sexual self-restraint might have a similar lack of self-restraint when it comes to booze.

It is possible that Jack will be judged not on his skills as a pilot but on his morals. And it is obvious that the press is gunning for Jack.

Glenn Ford is in fine form as a decent man who might possibly be allowing his personal feelings to interfere with his judgment. Ford could play tortured characters extremely well without resorting to Method acting histrionics. The underrated Rod Taylor is also excellent as another man who might have been wrestling with some inner demons. These are the two performances that matter.

Suzanne Pleshette is very solid, and Nancy Kwan and Constance Towers are very good as two of Jack’s girlfriends. It’s fun to see Jane Russell doing a cameo as herself. It’s also fun that her garters are important pieces of evidence!

There are a lot of flashbacks which give us insights into the personalities of both Jack and Sam.

This is a movie that plays fair with the viewer. A sufficiently alert viewer can certainly solve the mystery before Sam does (I did).

This movie was based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann who also wrote the source novels for two of the best aviation disaster thriller movies ever made, The High and the Mighty (1954) and Island in the Sky (1953).

Fate is the Hunter is both a fine aviation thriller and a decent puzzle movie. Highly recommended.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray which offers a superb transfer and includes both Spanish and English language versions (the latter with removable Spanish subtitles). I can recommend this Blu-Ray without any reservations.

The Last Flight (1931)

The Last Flight, released by First National Pictures in 1931, is a fascinating pre-code exercise in post-war angst and existential despair.

It was written by John Monk Saunders, whose writing credits encompass most of the classic World War I aviation movies of the 20s and 30s including Wings (1927) and the original 1930 version of The Dawn Patrol. He had been an army flight instructor during the war. His job was to teach men to kill, and die, in the air. It had an effect. Saunders committed suicide in 1940 at the age of forty-five.

The Last Flight begins with two buddies, Lieutenants Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) and Shep Lambert (David Manners), in the midst of their final dogfight over France in 1918. They survive the crash of their plane.

They are among the lucky ones who returned from the war alive. Or are they lucky? When you send young men off to war, even if they come back alive they haven’t really survived. Cary and Shep are all broken inside. Not physically, but mentally and spiritually and emotionally. They are the walking dead.

They head to Paris when peace comes. They only know how to fly and to kill, not useful peacetime skills. And they can’t fly any more. Their nerves are shattered. There is however one thing they can do. They can drink. They decide to devote their lives to drinking.

There’s lots of Lost Generation stuff in this movie. This was 1931. The new American literary superstars were writers like Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, chroniclers of that Lost Generation.

Cary and Shep hang around with other American WW1 vets, all of them broken in some way by the war and all living lives devoted to empty despairing hedonism.

Then they meet a very strange girl. Her name is Nikki (Helen Chandler). To say that she’s eccentric would be putting it mildly. She’s totally mad. She’s also charming, pretty, likeable and weirdly fascinating. Soon she is surrounded by half a dozen drunken admirers, all broken-down ex-flyers. She recognises flyers immediately. They have a certain look in their eyes. She doesn’t actually say this but I think it’s fair to surmise that she can see in their eyes that they have looked upon the face of death.

There’s more than a tinge of existentialism. These young men, and this young woman, have freedom but they have no idea what to do with it. They have their pleasures, but their pleasures leave them feeling empty. The war has destroyed their faith in the old values. They have found no new values in which to believe. Being drunk makes them cheerful, but it’s a despairing kind of forced cheerfulness. They’re going nowhere and they’re in a hurry.

In this very year, 1931, David Manners and Helen Chandler would be paired in a much more famous movie, Dracula. Considering how dull they were in Dracula their performances in The Last Flight come as quite a surprise. David Manners is quite good. Helen Chandler’s performance is bizarre but it’s bizarre in just the right way and it works perfectly. Nikki is a Lost Girl. Like the men she just drifts through life without actually living.

Richard Barthelmess was, briefly, a very big star. He’s very good here. All the performances are nicely judged, with the right amount of disconnectedness.

What makes this a pre-code movie is not the sexual content (there is very little to speak of) but its cynicism about military glory and the military in general, and its overall pessimism. I don’t think the Production Code Authority would have tolerated such a negative view of the military.

The plot takes some very unexpected turns towards the end. There are events that come out of the blue, but given the way these people live you can’t help feeling that something like this was bound to happen. I like the way the shocks are not foreshadowed.

The Last Flight is one of the more successful attempts to capture existentialism on film. It’s a fascinating movie and because it’s a pre-code movie it’s pleasingly unpredictable. Highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very good transfer. It’s barebones. That’s perhaps a pity since this movie is probably easier to appreciate if you know a bit about the intellectual currents of the time.

Murder in the Clouds (1934)

Murder in the Clouds is a 1934 aviation mystery thriller from First National Pictures (which was of course by that time a division of Warner Brothers).

Bob ‘Three Star’ Halsey (Lyle Talbot) is the ace pilot at Trans America Air Lines. He’s the source of constant exasperation to the airline boss Lackey. He drinks too much, gambles too much and gets into too many fights but there’s nothing Lackey can do about it - Three Star is just too good a pilot to fire.

Three Star’s girlfriend is Judy (Ann Dvorak), one of the airline’s stewardesses (yes I know we’re supposed to call them flight attendants these days but in 1934 they were stewardesses). Judy would marry Three Star in a minute if she could convince herself he would make a reliable husband but since she can’t convince herself of any such thing she’s waiting for a miracle that will turn him into husband material. One of the other pilots, George Wexley (Gordon Westcott), is kinda sweet on Judy as well.

Now the airline has been given a vital job by the government - to fly a top scientist (who has invented a new military explosive) to an important meeting. They need the very best pilot for this job, and that means Three Star Halsey. But there’s a sinister plot afoot and Three Star isn’t going to make that flight. Wexley will make it instead.

That flight could be a flight to disaster. The scientist is carrying a cylinder of the new explosive and it’s obvious that bad guys, probably in cahoots with foreign spies, will stop at nothing to get it. There’s going to be murder and mayhem and Judy will get caught in the middle. And Three Star will do anything to save his girl.

D. Ross Lederman was a typical journeyman director of B-features, especially westerns. Not a great director but extremely competent when it came to action scenes and a man who understood the importance of pacing. Future studio big shot Dore Schary co-wrote the screenplay.

Lyle Talbot, always a wonderfully entertaining actor, is perfectly cast as the brave but irresponsible Three Star. Talbot has the charisma to pull off a rôle like this without any trouble at all. Ann Dvorak is also very good as the good-natured but slightly cynical Judy. There was always just a slight edge of hysteria to Dvorak’s performances but that’s what made her an interesting actress. You always think she might be about to cry, or scream, or kiss someone, or shoot someone. Judy is more than just the love interest for the hero, as she gets to prove she can be pretty resourceful as well.

There’s lots of great footage of vintage aircraft including Ford Tri-Motors, an eleven-passenger aircraft which was a mainstay of American civil aviation in the late ’20s and the ’30s. There’s some quite exceptional aerial photography. There are even dogfights! Very well staged dogfights. And Ann Dvorak looks pretty fetching in her rather sexy 1934-era stewardess uniform.

OK, the plot is at best workmanlike and there isn’t much of a mystery but the characters are engaging. We want things to work out between Three Star and Judy because they’re likeable and we believe in them. There’s a spy thriller element but the canister of explosive is really just a McGuffin. What matters is that there’s something that the bad guys are prepared to kill for.

There’s action in the skies and on the ground, there’s some suspense and there’s romance. In other words, there’s everything you need to make a thoroughly enjoyable B-picture. The two leads are excellent and the supporting cast is good, especially George Cooper providing some low-key comic relief as the world’s most hopeless pilot.

Alpha Video’s DVD is pretty good. The transfer is very acceptable indeed.

Murder in the Clouds is just plenty of good clean fun. Highly recommended.

The Night My Number Came Up (1955)

The Night My Number Came Up is a 1955 Ealing Studios production and it’s one of those odd little movies that they don’t make nowadays (and more’s the pity). It’s a kind of semi-paranormal vaguely supernatural psychological suspense aviation thriller.

Air Marshal Hardie (Michael Redgrave) and his aide Flight Lieutenant McKenzie (Denholm Elliott) have just flown in to Hong Kong in an R.A.F. Dakota. A Naval officer, Commander Lindsay (Michael Hordern), was on the flight as well. Hardie and McKenzie are to fly on to Tokyo on the following morning.

Commander Lindsay had had a disturbing and very vivid dream on the previous night. In the dream the Dakota carrying the Air Marshal became lost in fog and crashed. Commander Lindsay wasn’t aboard the aircraft in the dream.

Of course it’s all nonsense. The dream involved a Dakota but the Air Marshal is actually continuing his journey to Japan on board a Liberator. And there will only be two passengers - in the dream there were eight passengers. So of course the dream is nothing at all to worry about. All a lot of silly superstitious rot.

The night before the flight to Tokyo diplomat Owen Robertson (Alexander Knox) is informed that his presence is required in Tokyo immediately, along with diplomatic bigwig Lord Wainwright and his staff. And they won’t be flying in a Liberator after all. They’ll be flying in a Dakota. Just like the one in the dream. But there will only be six passengers. Until at the very last moment two more passengers are added. Now there are eight passengers. And one of them is an attractive young woman. It’s all exactly as in the dream.

The lead-up is done is a nicely low-key way. No-one is at all worried by the dream. If you start believing in dreams soon you’ll be believing in all manner of superstitious tommy rot. Englishmen in the 20th century don’t put any store by superstition. It’s all just a coincidence. Mr Robertson isn’t really worried at all, even if he does order a large brandy just before take-off.

To increase the tension there are actually two flights. The Dakota will fly first to Okinawa and then refuel and fly on to Tokyo on the following day. This split journey gives the passengers lots of time to worry and to brood. Which they do.

This is a slow-burning suspense movie and while we’re waiting for the fatal flight (or the flight that might be fatal if the dream is true) the main interest is provided by watching the effect the dream has on the passengers, and the effects that the passengers then have on each other. Long before the aircraft is due to take off everyone who is going to be making the flight knows all about the dream and they’ve had a long night to think about it.

The one thing Air Marshal Hardie is grateful for is that nobody told the pilot about the dream. If you tell a pilot something like that it can have a very bad effect in a crisis. He can start to think that his number’s up and there’s nothing he can do about it. But as long as the pilot doesn’t know about the dream it’s alright. Except that someone did tell the pilot.

The build-up is slow and deliberate and intentionally so. And it’s very effective. And when things do start to get scary and exciting they do so in a big way.

This movie certainly has a very strong cast. All the cast members perform splendidly and all are careful to keep their performances on the low-key side. Lots of stuff upper lips disguising lots of inner turmoil.

Owen Robertson is already starting to fall apart. He’s terrified of flying at the best of times and now he’s well and truly spooked. Flight Lieutenant McKenzie is not in the best of shape either. He had been a notable fighter ace in the Battle of Britain but had had a major nervous breakdown and had to be taken off flying duties. He recovered from the breakdown, but he has perhaps been left with slightly shaky nerves. Those nerves are getting shakier as the time for take-off gets nearer. Air Marshal Hardie is adamant that he is not worried at all but we have reason to suspect that he’s whistling in the dark.

Nobody wants to believe in the dream because really it’s all so silly but what can’t be denied is the uncanniness with which events seem to conspire to bring about precisely the situation of Commander Lindsay’s dream. Even the most rational person can start thinking along superstitious lines given the right stimulus.

There are obviously lots of flying sequences and they’re exceptionally well done and quite convincing.

The Studiocanal Region 2 DVD is barebones but the transfer is extremely good (the movie is in black-and-white and in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio).

The Night My Number Came Up is an offbeat but very tense little thriller which achieves a very effective sense of the uncanny. An excellent film. Highly recommended.

Jet Storm (1959)

Jet Storm is an aviation disaster movie but in several interesting ways it differs from most movies of this type. This British production was released in 1959.

Thirty-two passengers are about to board an airliner in London en route to New York. One of the passengers, Ernest Tilley (Richard Attenborough), seems a bit distracted. He has good reason to be. He has just spotted a man about to board the same aircraft. He has been searching for this man for two years. He knew the man would be taking this flight but now he has confirmation. The man is James Brock (George Rose) and he was responsible for the death of Ernest Tilley’s seven-year-old daughter in a hit-and-run accident.

Not long after take-off two other passengers overhear Tilley talking to his wife. What they hear disturbs them enough to cause them to inform the pilot, Captain Bardow (Stanley Baker). Tilley was telling his wife that James Brock was about to die.

After speaking to Tilley it is obvious to Bardow that Tilley, an explosives expert, has planted a bomb aboard the plane. He intends to kill James Brock, and everyone else on board. Tilley blames the whole world for the death of his daughter, his bitterness exacerbated by his belief that Brock escaped justice through bribery. Bardow’s problem is that he has no way of knowing how Tilley intends to trigger the bomb so Tilley will have to be approached very carefully. Given his expertise in explosives it is likely that Tilley has designed his bomb with a remote control detonating device and any attempt to rush him, or threaten him, is likely to result in the immediate detonation of the bomb.

This movie is a skillful exercise in slow-burning suspense. At first no-one takes Tilley seriously. They assume he is merely making empty verbal threats. It gradually dawns on the passengers and crew that Tilley is dead serious and that his threats are anything but empty.

This movie does not quite follow the usual aviation disaster movie formula. While there is plenty of nail-biting suspense the real emphasis here is on the psychological reactions of the passengers. Thirty-two people suddenly find themselves facing possible imminent death. How will they react? As it turns out some deal with the situation with courage and cheerfulness. Others react with cowardice, selfishness, stupidity and viciousness. Tilley wants to kill everyone aboard because he believes that people are worthless and that when they discover they are about to die they will reveal themselves as corrupt and vicious and cowardly. In the case of about half the passengers his assessment is spot on. The question then becomes - can those passengers who behave bravely and decently somehow convince Tilley that people are worth saving?

And can the passengers who keep their nerve prevent those who have lost theirs from doing something foolish that will result in everyone’s death?

This film also departs from the usual formula in that the crew are not heroic paragons of virtue who save the day through their incredible skill and bravery. Captain Bardow is brave and he is very competent but no amount of flying skill is going to make any difference. Any attempt by the crew, no matter how brave and self-sacrificing they might be, to take any overt action against Tilley will simply cause him to blow up the aircraft immediately.

If the airliner and those aboard are to be saved it’s going to require a more subtle and indirect approach.

Richard Attenborough made a career out of playing vulnerable and/or damaged characters  and he’s wise enough to underplay his performance, which has the effect of making Tilley much more menacing. Tilley is just the sort of quiet inoffensive little man who might blow up an aircraft. Stanley Baker is excellent, as always. The support cast is a galaxy of wonderful British character actors. They’re all good and it’s almost unfair to single anyone out although special mention must be made of Dame Sybil Thorndike and also Elizabeth Sellars’ performance as the cool and aristocratic Inez Barrington. 

Interestingly enough the airliner portrayed in the film is a Russian Tupolev Tu-104. At the time the film was made the only other jet airliner in service was the British de Havilland Comet but given the series of well-publicised and disastrous crashes suffered by the British aircraft the producers might have thought that using a Comet for the film would be in poor taste.

Writer-director Cy Endfield went on to achieve huge success a few years later with Zulu. There are in fact intriguing parallels between the two movies - in both cases you have a potentially disastrous situation in which courage alone is not enough to save the day. Courage is certainly required, but it has to be combined with coolness and discipline. 

Jet Storm is not just one of the best aviation disaster movies it’s also a complex and engrossing psychological drama. Very entertaining and highly recommended.

Murder in the Air (1940)

Murder in the Air was the fourth and final of the Warner Brothers B-movies starring Ronald Reagan as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft. As a bonus this one includes action on board a zeppelin! Not a German zeppelin but a US Navy dirigible which is every bit as cool. There’s no way I could possibly fail to love a movie that involves airships.

Murder in the Air was released in June 1940. The United States was theoretically at peace but war fever had already started to sweep Hollywood. This movie deals with foreign spies and saboteurs trying to wreck the US military forces. They aren’t specifically identified as German but they all have foreign accents that sound vaguely German. 

Brass Bancroft has to go undercover, posing as a saboteur in the employ of a sinister foreign spy ring. The Secret Service got a lucky break when the real saboteur was killed in a railroad accident. Brass has been fully briefed and should have no trouble passing him off as the saboteur, except for one minor detail that got overlooked - the saboteur’s wife is part of the spy ring and she’s likely to notice a little thing like her husband suddenly being replaced by a different man.

The spy ring’s target is the US Navy airship Mason which is currently testing a new super-secret weapon, the inertia projector. This weapon can cripple an enemy fleet by knocking out all its electrical equipment. So this movie not only has airships, it also has a kind of death ray. It might not be an actual death ray but the good news is that it looks just like a death ray projector.

In actual fact the US Navy had already abandoned rigid airships by this time after the disastrous losses of the USS Macon (not Mason) and USS Akron. But airships are just so inherently cool that the producers magically resurrected them for this movie.

The plot is fairly basic but there’s plenty of action and excitement (there’s even a hurricane thrown in for good measure) and the very brief running time keeps the pacing tight so there’s no chance of boredom setting in.

Lewis Seiler was a solid journeyman director and injects the necessary urgency into proceedings.

Ronald Reagan was ideal for the role of Brass Bancroft. He can be convincingly heroic and he has an easy-going charm. Unfortunately in these movies he was saddled with one of the most irritating comic relief sidekicks in B-movie history in the person of the lamentably unfunny Eddie Foy Jr. The good news is that once Brass goes undercover his sidekick gets left behind and the movie improves enormously. Lya Lys plays the dead saboteur’s wife but gets little to do. James Stephenson makes an adequate chief villain.

Obviously stock footage was used for the exterior airship scenes but the scenes onboard the Mason makes use of some fairly convincing and interesting sets. And to be fair the stock footage is integrated surprisingly successfully into the movie. 

All four Brass Bancroft movies are available on made-on-demand DVD in a boxed set in the Warner Archive series. The transfers are very good and the set is good value for B-picture fans. I warmly recommend the first two movies of the series, Secret Service of the Air and Code of the Secret Service (especially the former).

The Brass Bancroft movies are fine undemanding entertainment and Murder in the Air is one of the strongest entries in the series. The airship setting adds extra interest and the ending provides some real thrills. Highly recommended.

Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939)

Nick Carter, Master Detective was made in 1939 and was the first of three Nick Carter B-pictures made by MGM with Walter Pidgeon in the starring role. 

Nick Carter had started as a detective hero in dime novels in the 1880s and subsequently featured in several thousand stories over the course of more than a century. The character underwent several metamorphoses, being at times a Sherlock Holmes-style detective, a pulp superhero, a hard-boiled detective and eventually the hero of several hundred spy novels. This movie has chosen to make him a fairly routine private detective. 

Nick Carter has been assigned to investigate industrial espionage at an aircraft plant and since the plant is producing the prototype for a highly advanced new fighter it’s possible that this is more than just routine industrial espionage-foreign spies may be at work. Security at the aircraft factory is so tight that there is no way that blueprints could possibly be smuggled out, but they are being smuggled out.

Aircraft play a major part throughout the story and in fact the movie kicks off with an excellent aerial action sequence which ends with plucky stewardess Lou Farnsby (Rita Johnson) taking over the controls of the airliner. She will provide the movie’s love interest but Nick suspects she may actually be involved in the spy ring. But then Nick is inclined to suspect everybody.

Bertram Millhauser’s screnplay provides the film with a pretty decent plot and the method by which the spy ring operates is quite clever. The tone is fairly light-hearted but mostly it avoids the danger of descending into silliness and it stays fairly tightly focused on the espionage plot. The dialogue doesn’t always have quite the zest one might have hoped for but it does have some amusing moments and on the whole the script serves the film fairly well.

One of the more notable things about these MGM programmers was that the first two were helmed by Jacques Tourneur. There are only a few signs of Tourneur’s later distinctiveness in Nick Carter, Master Detective but it’s already obvious that he was much more than just a competent director of B-pictures. The action sequences are very ambitious by B-movie standards and extremely well executed. They include some fine aerial action scenes. Process shots were obviously employed but they’re done very well. We don’t get any car chases but we do get chases involving aircraft, a speedboat and a large ship.

There are none of the classic night scenes of 1940s Tourneur movies but he does make very good use of fog, not just for atmosphere but to add mystery and excitement to the action scenes. It also has to be said that this film is remarkably well paced.

The fact that the literary versions of Nick Carter had been churned out by many different hack writers and that the character had undergone various changes means that unlike other heroes of B-picture series he did not really have a clearly established personality. This becomes a slight problem in the movie in that the hero does seem a bit generic. The most successful B-film mystery series were the ones that featured a colourful hero with a truly distinctive style - The Saint, Charlie Chan, Mr Moto, Sherlock Holmes and so on. MGM were clearly hoping to make Nick Carter an urbane Simon Templar-style hero but he lacks the wit and devil-may-care charm of The Saint and to be honest Walter Pidgeon just does not have the charisma of a George Sanders. Pidgeon’s performance is quite good and at times amusingly languid but it doesn’t quite have enough of a definite flavour.

Comic relief is provided by Donald Meek as Bartholomew the Bee Man. He’s not Carter’s sidekick but a beekeeper and would-be amateur detective. Carter has no desire whatsoever to have Bartholomew’s assistance but  he just keeps turning up and on occasions his bumbling efforts actually do help. As comic relief characters go he’s one of the best you’ll come across in B-pictures of this era and he is actually funny, and manages to be genuinely crazy rather than just foolish.

Rita Johnson is a competent female lead and the supporting cast is solid. Look out for Martin Kosleck, naturally playing a sinister foreigner who just has to be a spy! The chief bad guy is not an over-the-top villain but it’s his very calm and matter-of-fact evilness that makes him scary.

All three Nick Carter movies are included on a single disc in the Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD series. Nick Carter, Master Detective gets a very good transfer.

Nick Carter, Master Detective is an above-average B-movie of its era. It has a well-constructed plot, acceptable acting, more action scenes than was usual in such productions and in general it’s well-made and makes very enjoyable viewing. Highly recommended.

China Clipper (1936)

China Clipper is a 1936 First National Pictures aviation drama inspired by the early history of Pan American Airways. The flying sequences are the highlight but it’s quite a good little movie.

Dave Logan (Pat O’Brien) had been a pilot in the First World War. He’d given up flying in order to get a respectable job with prospects (being newly married). Then he sees the ticker-tape parade for Charles Lindberg and the flying bug bites him again. Dave Logan is a going into the aviation business.

Business is the operative word. Logan is not interested in being a barnstorming pilot. He wants to run an airline. A real airline, on the grand scale. He even has a visions of operating a trans-Pacific air service, even though people keep assuring him that such a thing is impossible.

Trans Ocean Airways gets off to a rocky start, with bankruptcy a constant threat. Logan’s faith in the future of aviation is however unswerving. The future of his marriage seems far less assured. 

Logan recruits a few of his old flying buddies from the First World War, including Hap Stuart (Humphrey Bogart) and Tom Collins (Ross Alexander). He also has the services of visionary aircraft designer Dad Brunn (Henry B. Walthall), who shares his faith that one day giant airliners will fly the Pacific. 

As his marriage breaks up Logan starts to change. He is even more driven (not a bad thing  in that those pioneer aviating days) but he seems to be becoming less human. He drives his people very hard indeed, perhaps too hard. Nothing matters to Logan apart from the airline.

Finally Dad Brunn comes up with an aircraft design that can make Logan’s dreams a reality - the famous China Clipper (in reality a Martin M-130 flying boat). The problem is that the airline has to make the first trans-Pacific flight before a certain date, otherwise they lose their landing rights. So it’s a race against time - and against a typhoon.

The movie balances melodrama and exciting flying sequences extremely well. Very wisely they elected to make the aircraft the real stars and we see a lot of them. Much of the footage is of the actual China Clipper (you can clearly see the Pan American markings on the aircraft even though in the movie the airline is supposed to be Trans Ocean Airways). This movie is reminiscent of Howard Hawks’ great aviation movies of the 30s like Ceiling Zero and Only Angels Have Wings - the emphasis is on the heroism of man against nature. Of course it goes without saying that the Hawks movies have a lot more depth and complexity. China Clipper is much more upbeat and optimistic.

Pat O’Brien doesn’t shout as much as usual. He seems to be aiming for subtlety here and he does a reasonable job. It would have been interesting to see what Bogart might have done with the lead role a few years later but in 1936 he didn’t yet have the acting chops for it. As it stands Bogart he’s fine as the cheerful if sometimes rebellious Hap Stuart and his performance is all the more effective for being deliberately underplayed. Hap is a brave man and he doesn’t need to make a song and dance about it. He relies on calmness, competence and efficiency.

Ross Alexander is breezy and engaging as the loyal Tom Collins. Beverly Roberts is solid as Logan’s wife Jean but the part is badly underwritten. Marie Wilson provides comic relief as the girlfriend Tom Collins just can’t get rid of. This comic relief is kept to a minimum but what there is of it is quite amusing.

Director Ray Enright’s career did not reach any great heights but he keeps things moving along briskly.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD release provides no extras but a good transfer. 

China Clipper is very much a movie for aviation fans. There are lots of cool 1920s and 1930s aircraft, especially flying boats and lots of flying. It avoids most of the expected clichés of aviation movies - the driving ambition of Dave Logan and the quiet heroism of the pilots is enough to carry the film without requiring any bad guys or conspiracies or complex sub-plots. The epic trans-Pacific flight is what this movie is all about and that’s what it concentrates on. Fine entertainment. Recommended.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965)

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is a big spectacular adventure comedy about an air race and it succeeds admirably as both spectacle and comedy. It was a major box office hit for 20th Century-Fox, coming at a time when they desperately needed some box-office successes to offset their huge losses on Cleopatra.

It was an entirely British production and considering its epic scale and the astounding technical challenges it presented the budget was by no means outrageously high. It cost only half as much to make as the similarly-themed and exactly contemporary The Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines made a good deal more money.

It success had a good deal to do with the boldness of the idea - rather than a car race movie this would be an air race movie, set in 1910. The problem of course is where do you find 1910-vintage aeroplanes in 1965? The obvious solution would have been to use miniatures but writer-director Ken Annakin was adamant that he was not going to do that. He wanted actual aircraft. That meant they would have to be built for the film. And they were. The aircraft were accurate replicas of real 1910-era aircraft (and several of the replica aircraft are still flying today). 

The basic idea provided the bare bones of the plot which were fleshed out with a romantic-triangle sub-plot, rivalries between the competing aviators and some dastardly dirty tricks by a villainous competitor.

Richard Mays (James Fox) is a Guards officer and keen aviation enthusiast who has built an aeroplane with some help from his girlfriend Patricia (Sarah Miles). They manage to persuade her father, the fabulously wealthy newspaper proprietor Lord Rawnsley (Robert Morley), to organise and finance an air race from London to Paris, with a very generous prize for the winner. The race attracts competitors from all over the globe.

Among those attracted by the prize money is Arizona cowboy and flyer Orvil Newton (Stuart Whitman). Newton will soon become a rival for the affections of Patricia, thus setting up the obligatory romantic triangle. 

National rivalries soon erupt, particularly between the French entrant Pierre Dubois (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and the German military aviation contingent led by Colonel Manfred Von Holstein (Gert Fröbe). This culminates in an outlandish duel with the weapons being balloons and blunderbusses.

Despite these tensions the pilots are all brave and honourable men. Well, almost all. Sir Percy Ware-Armitage is not especially brave and he is not in the least honourable. In fact he is an unmitigated bounder and cad and he intends to cheat and to cheat outrageously, even stooping to sabotaging his rivals’ machines. Or at least he gets his manservant Courtney (Eric Sykes) to sabotage them - Ware-Armitage doesn’t care to take the risks involved himself.

The plot doesn’t have a great deal to it but that matters not at all. There are plenty of gags including a good deal of slapstick. I’ve never been a fan of slapstick but the slapstick in this movie is based on clever stunts involving aircraft, cars, motorcycles and fire engines rather than pratfalls and pie fights and I must admit I found it to be rather funny. The romantic triangle works quite well. The period detail is superb - the costumes are gorgeous, the sets are impressive, the aircraft look terrific, there’s some luscious photography and most importantly the aerial sequences are absolutely superb.

Those aerial sequences were achieved with a great deal of real flying skillfully mixed with remarkably well-executed process shots and with scenes shot using some extraordinarily elaborate machines designed by special effects wizard Dick Parker that allowed the real aircraft to be suspended from wires. The flying scenes looked mightily impressive in 1965, and they look mightily impressive today.

The cast is another major bonus. The various characters are all national stereotypes but the stereotyping is done in a fun and rather affectionate manner without any malice. Even the ridiculously pompous Colonel Manfred Von Holstein is a brave man trying to do his duty. James Fox plays his character as an English upper-class stuffed shirt but there’s a basic generosity of spirit underneath that stuffed shirt. When he has to do the right thing he not only does so unhesitatingly, he does so cheerfully. Jean-Pierre Cassel as the Frenchman Dubois has a passion for the ladies and Alberto Sordi as the Italian Count Emilio Ponticelli is passionate and volatile but they are good-natured and they are daring and courageous airmen. Yûjirô Ishihara as the Japanese entrant Yamamato speaks more like an educated Englishman than any educated Englishman. Some of the leading players (such as Jean-Pierre Cassel and Sarah Miles) had virtually no experience in comedy but they handled the challenge with enthusiasm and success.

There are fine performances in minor roles by some superb English comics - there’s Tony Hancock as a mad aircraft designer, Will Rushton as Lord Rawnsley’s chief flunkey and Benny Hill as a fire chief.

Of course Terry-Thomas steals the picture. He always did. The interplay between his character and that played by Eric Sykes is a major highlight. Having said that, there’s not a single bad performance. Gert Fröbe is superb and gets the single best line in the movie.

20th Century-Fox chief Daryll F. Zanuck imposed numerous changes on the picture. Ken Annakin resented this at the time but later admitted that Zanuck’s instincts were correct and that the changes were beneficial. Annakin had seen the movie as a straight mixture of comedy and spectacular flying sequences. Zanuck wanted to broaden the film’s appeal by beefing up the romance angle. He wanted it to appeal to everybody and the end result was a movie that really did please just about everybody.

This movie involved so much technical complexity that inevitably it started to run over budget, to the point where the front office ordered the production shut down. Director Ken Annakin simply ignored them and went on shooting and completed the picture. Fortunately once the studio execs saw the final result they realised they had a winner on their hands and all was forgiven.

The Region 4 DVD offers a very good anamorphic transfer and comes with some very worthwhile extras. These include a director’s commentary track and an image gallery that not only features photographs of the replica aircraft, historical photos and technical drawings of the aircraft of the era, but also photos of Dick Parker’s remarkable flying rig (incorporating huge cranes with wires slung between them carrying a trolley that supported the aircraft for simulated flying shots).

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is simply magnificent entertainment. It’s a family movie that really should please every member of the family. It’s also one of the most visually impressive flying movies ever made. Highly recommended.