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.

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.

The film has attractive leads, but the plot of the film is clumsy and confusing. Essentially Alan Curtis is a private pilot who is contacted at the last moment to fly a group of people to Las Vegas. It turns out that the people on the plane are attesting to sell atomic secrets, and it also turns out that Alan Curtis is a retired FBI agent. The film print was quite good considering that the movie is in the public domain, and the film appeared to have been shot entirely on location, no actual film sets at all, giving the film a somewhat low-budget feel. The film has a good leading cast: Alan Curtis, a former model turned actor, and Evelyn Ankers, Universal Studios horror queen. Jerome Cowan also has a good role as one of the crooked businessmen.

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.

The temptation is to say simply, "yes it is" or to call it a movie to nowhere, but I won't (nor will I say that it reminds me of a certain filmmaker named Wood in technical skill)

A map containing nuclear secrets has been stolen from a Korean national. Getting information that the map maybe in the LA area, an agent named Donovan springs into action and steers the suspected thieves toward an old friend, and ex FBI agent's charter flight service.Much talk and travel result.

Give the film points for clearly being shot on location and in actual room instead of on sets, however take a few away for being slow and talky and not particularly well thought out. I was over half way into this short film and I had no real idea what was going on as the cast was shunted from place to place. Little of it made any real sense since I couldn't imagine people actually behaving like that. By the time the "action" turned up near the end I was almost asleep.

Not a bad film as such, but an incredibly dull one. One has to think that the film was made to scam hotel rooms from unsuspecting resort owners. Insomniacs need only apply