Flight from Vienna

This E.J. Fancy production has a good script for the first thirty minutes, decent actors, good night photography, obvious day-for-night shots. It also has abysmally awful production values that are not helped in the least by the shooting at night and the combination of stock shots and ham-handed post-production that make you notice them instead of what's going on.

The first thirty minutes are about a high-ranking Communist spy -- Theodore Bikel -- who wanders into Vienna and tries to defect -- but no one seems to want him. After half an hour, some one suggests that there's a scientists behind the Iron Curtain that would be welcome in the west, so he heads back to Hungary and we spend some time watching him try to get himself, his wife and the scientists across the border. A few warm moments of decent, underplayed acting are inserted into undercranked MOS sequences punctuated by very dramatic music. That, however, takes only fifteen minutes and there's still another fifteen minutes to go....