The Flight that Disappeared (1961)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 11 minutes, rated 5.6 by 446 cinematizens
Genre; Sy Fy
Verdict: Zzzzzzzzz
The cast assembles on a wide-bodied trans-continental jet passenger plane, as per the movie poster, only to discover it has propeller-driven engines! Gadzooks!
The identity problem of the airplane is only the first of their problems.
This is the Otranto Airlines Flight 000 from LA to DC with no stops at SL on the way. Remember overhead bins without doors? Well, I do and it was nostalgic seeing them again, waiting for the rain of hats and coats which never came. This film is too high concept for that old chestnut.
The passengers board; everyone smokes. Beau sits next to Belle and he is astounded to discover she can add 2 + 2. That mathematicians for you. He on the other hand is an engineer, motors and such, but the only oil is in his manner not in his pores and he does not have the one long finger nail mechanics need to get at screw heads, or so I have been told. His engineering is done on the drawing board: ‘That should work!’
Silently enduring an attack of the piles with many a grimace is a bearded man with a deep voice. He has to be a professor what with the way he cannot find his ticket.
Then there is the salesman stereotype played by the ever reliably irritating Roy Engel (aka as Engle) and a middle-aged blind woman with her attentive but not very bright husband. Yes he is a proto-GOP specimen off the petri dish who raves about Reds among the dust bunnies under his seat.
Nailed it, this is a Cold War …, well, ‘drama’ seems too strong a word, let’s just say, piece, and leave the ‘of what’ to the imagination. The intentions are the only thing good about it.
Half the run time is assembling the cast. The only drama is handled by the supporting actors in the cockpit and they do it well, when those prop wannabe jet engines take on a life of their own. The pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and cabin staff up front play out a drama within the play in the few minutes they have the camera.
Turns out Prof, Belle, and Beau are the brains of a new super-duper weapon that will vaporise THEM and they are travelling to DC to sign the death warrant for civilisation.
After Husband jumps out of the back door, they realise that a higher force has rid them of that nuisance so that it can judge them for their about to be sins. Remember, it made sense to the screenplay writer.
The plane is suspended at an impossible height and they exit through the same door — very gingerly — to meet a silent, youthful jury and a judge who lectures them on their destructive weapon while in the mist the jurors mutter. It is all allegorical or metaphysical or hermeneutical or something. Scientists are held responsible, not the politicians and soldiers who might use such a weapon. Does that compute?
STOP!
It has the seriousness, the sincerity, the drivel of a play written by a high school student. If we changed the weapon to pollution and the scientists to moguls I might suspect an acned Al Gore! It is that wooden, pompous, and vacuous.
The dialogue is lifeless and there is no action. Most of the players are more intent on finding their floor marks than projecting. Odd that since most are sitting down. Though there is a corker of a review on IMDb written by a full bo[o]r(e) GOPer. Check it out. It is easy to spot with its 10-point rating and incoherent spouting. At least Husband had the grace to exit. He must have known what was coming.
Once Sunday School is out, the three scientists get a reprieve to eat their notes instead of the airline food, which at the time was probably a better culinary choice. There will be no Yankee super weapon. Kind of makes you wonder what THEM will do though. (Guilty, I had the volume so low it is possible that the lecturer covered that and I missed it. Maybe he has a sibling lecturing away in Russian.)
The clue that it was a fantasy was that the airplane is so wide-bodied that three people could walk past each other in the aisle!
Not even Aristotle could figure out why the jumping husband was there in the first place and why the wife had to be blind. After he jumped she was written out.
The IMDb entry gives a release data of September 1961, but no further details. A cynic might suspect it was released into the wild and no one took it. No premiere location is given contrary to the general practice.