Written and directed by Charles Marquis Warren, Flight to Tangier stars Joan Fontaine, Jack Palance, Corinne Calvet and Robert Douglas. Music is by Paul Sawtell and cinematography by Ray Rennahan.
Tangier airport, and a group of people await the arrival of as plane from behind the Iron Curtain. When said plane crashes and burns, it is found that there are no survivors or indeed any corpses. So exactly where is the missing courier worth $3 million? And just exactly what do these group of people have to do with the crashed plane?
Someone somewhere in a big room full of executives at Paramount Pictures thought this was going to be a great Cold War type thriller. A drama awash with spies, black market dastards, shifty femmes and undercover operatives. Unfortunately what follows is immeasurably dull. A bunch of folk stand around musing about politico guff, then there's a half hearted chase sequence, some more politico guff, another lame chase sequence, and on it goes in the same fashion until the inevitable tepid ending closes the whole sorry picture down.
Fontaine, looking lovely as usual, and Palance give it plenty of gusto, while the Technicolor is nice to take in. But once the poorly scripted contrivances start to take precedence over character dynamics, and the action scenes begin to bore, you realise you have been cheated and feel the need to strangle one of those Paramount executives. So avoid unless you suffer from insomnia. 3/10
