Pilot X or Death in the Air (1936)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 9 minutes of runtime, 5.3/10.0 rated by 109 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: [Drone.]
The Setup: In the early days of passenger planes a number of them crash, killing the passengers. This is bad for business. We are spared the number of deaths. But each plane has eight to ten on board plus crew. We see crashed planes. We see newspaper headlines. We seen airline owners looking pained. We think of the Boeing Max. Then we cut to the interior of a plane aloft as a passenger sees a biplane approaching with guns blazing and an X on its fuselage. Rat-a-rat and down goes the passenger plane. Amid the burning rubble of the crashed aircraft before croaking a passenger describes this attack.
Now there is something to investigate and a government investigator comes who is seldom heard from thereafter, along with a psychologist, of course, and the greasy John Carroll. They narrow the search to five air aces who just happen to be in the neighbourhood of the last attack whom they invite to the Old Dark House for a confab. It is an ecumenical group of stereotypes: one French hand kisser, one Prussian heel clicker, one English snob, one Canadian lumberjack, and one Yankee doodle. Their host is the manufacturer of passenger planes, his comely daughter, and her intended – Stanley Baker (again). There are underlings around but forget them.
The shrink hides in a secret room behind a false panel from which he observes, records, pervs on the pilots. The whole house seems designed around this perving room. (The fraternity brothers wondered why they didn’t invite cheerleaders, altos, or the Sugar Babes.)
Once the suspects are assembled the pitch is that they join forces in a dawn patrol to flush out and dispatch Pilot X who is giving them all a bad name. Sneakily the hosts do not reveal that they suppose he is one of the assembled aces who will then show his hand. Nobody gives Stanley a second thought as he serves drinks, politely lets greasy Carroll grope his girl, turns on and off lights, plays Free Cell on his iPad, and is generally underfoot but self-effacing. Very suspicious, indeed. The one who seems most innocent is always guilty in the playbook.
One by one the pilots get toasted leaving the shrink none the wiser. Whoa, they are running out of pilots so he thinks deeply one night and slowly, ever so s-l-o-w-l-y, begins to write down the name of Pilot X. Geez, what’d ya know? Before he can finish the sentence: T h e k i l l e r i s … . He gets clonked. How he figured it out is anyone’s guess.
Bodycount : many passengers, three pilots, and now the shrink. All hail McKinsey management: The payroll is certainly being cut.
Then by some means, perhaps a Twitter post, that escaped this viewer they find a picture of Stanley in a kraut uniform. Huh? Had they read the script they would have known that his name was Göring but that gave them no clue. Huh! Any relation to Hermann by any chance?
While all the pilots flit around the deep one has been murdering far and wide. He kept his fighter plane up his sleeve, it seems. Where did he gas it up? Was a signature required for the UPS delivery of the ammunition? ‘Why’ is never explained, except maybe for fun. What is the fun in killing passengers on the unarmed plane? About the same fun as shotgunning rabbits I suppose or machine gunning school kids. Let’s ask the NRA. (N.B. the last time I used those letters, NRA, in a blog post I later got a very polite email from an alleged NRA representative suggesting the errors of my ways. [Gulp.])
Greasy and Stanley have a sky duel and virtue prevails in this work of fiction. The end.
There is a lot of (stock) aerial photography which is largely unfathomable. Moreover, when the pilots ascend they all dress like Snoopy on a date with the Red Baron— leather jacket, white scarf, and goggles — and they all have pencil moustaches so the fraternity brothers could not tell one from another.