Flight to Nowhere

A couple on board a plane find themselves mixed up in a plot to steal atomic secrets.

Low-budget spy thriller confuses with a hamstrung plot, hardly any suspense (lots of the action is off-camera) and mediocre performances.

Somewhere in the South Pacific there is a large supply of uranium that governments are keen to get their hands on. There is a great poster for this espionage mystery containing the picture of an atomic explosion and a cryptic piece about a ring that holds something valuable. That ring turns out to belong to Cathy (Evelyn Ankers) as a gift from her brother who sponges off her after she has inherited the family fortune. Hobe Carrington (Alan Curtis) is a fresh civilian flying charter flights in his Lockheed plane. He is hired by a 'countess' for a weekend that he had intended to keep for himself but her offer becomes too tempting for him to refuse. She springs other passengers on him at the last moment including Cathy and her brother Claude. The story continues in Death Valley where Hobe gets knocked out a few times as he realizes he is in the company of spies and racketeers. He doesn't know who he can trust which gets worse when his ex-wife turns up and reveals something about the past of the 'countess.' The plot gets untidy which is a pity because there are some sinister characters present who would have become really intriguing in a better production. This one and only release from Golden Gate Pictures has some locational interest going for it. Las Vegas can be seen when it was sparsely populated and there are some desert and ranch scenes filmed on the Iverson Movie Ranch where many famous screen cowboys once roamed.

Alan Curtis is an airplane pilot. He's approached by Countess Micheline Cheirel for a trip to Death Valley and a dinner for two. Before that happens, government man Jack Holt wants him for a job of espionage. When Miss Cheirel shows up, it's with a gaggle of other people, none of whom are what they appear to be. It eventuates they're all concerned with laying their hands on the movie's Maguffin, a map showing where some valuable uranium deposits are.

There is some good character writing in this script, and some of the performers are amusing, particularly Inez Courtney as Curtis' ex-wife, and Jerome Cowan as a guy who spends most of the movie advancing the plot by reading a book that tells the audience who the new characters are. However, the movie is directed and edited in such an overbearing manner, with a score that tries to make every dull moment an instant of high drama that it falls over its feet.

Alan Curtis is a charter pilot who gets a request from mysterious French lady Micheline to charter his plane to take a party to a desert resort. His former boss at the FBI Jack Holt encourages him even more and to keep an eye out for strange goings on.

A combination of a muddled script and horrible editing makes this film almost incoherent. Curtis catches the eye of Evelyn Ankers on the plane and she's slightly engaged to Roland Varno. And wouldn't you know it Curtis has an ex-wife at the resort with Inez Cooper. She's one cagey woman and has the best part in this bad independent film.

It's all about uranium folks that's a lot of miles away from the desert resort in fact at some isolated Pacific atoll. Somebody has a map, everybody wants it.

Even Hoot Gibson shows up as the local sheriff.

It's a cinematic mess.

A charter pilot gets mixed up with some stolen nuclear secrets and a few baddies that want to get there hands on these secrets. The pilot and the bad guys play a game of "hot potato" with the prized envelope as it's passed (or stolen) from one person to the next - over and over. It's all handled in the most excruciatingly dull manner imaginable. Seriously, I could barely hold my eyes open. And for a movie that runs at something like 75 minutes, that's not a good sign.

Beyond the wretched screenplay, I could go on and on with the problems I had with Flight to Nowhere. The laundry list would go something like this: It's cheap with poor lighting and even worse cinematography. Everything looks horrible. Even the music feels cheap. The sets are bargain basement and some of the acting is laughably bad. I know this wasn't a big budget, "A" film, but I've seen a lot of "B" movies that looked a million times better than this. Overall, a 3/10 for Flight to Nowhere is being generous.

One final thought - how many hits to the head can one man take? Our pilot hero should be suffering from a horrible case of post-concussion syndrome. There's no way I would trust him in the air with the repeated head trauma he suffers in this movie.