Masterful Movie

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Keen on saving the neck of a burglar who has been framed for a mob murder she witnessed overseas, a penniless London chorus girl stows away on a non-stop flight to New York and has to evade the mobsters who have also boarded in this crime thriller directed by Robert Stevenson in his pre-Disney days. As one might be able to deduce from such a complicated plot description alone, the movie is rife in convenient coincidences and implausible events, but it makes for relatively amusing viewing, provided one does not think about it too much. There are some great supporting turns, particularly from Francis L. Sullivan as the daunting main mobster, Desmond Tester in a comic relief part as a music student with too much spare time on his hands and Athene Seyler as his overbearing aunt. The real star of the show though is the titular aircraft that the protagonist boards and while the film is rather slow leading up to the reveal of the craft (35 minutes in), it is worth the wait. Spanning two floors with balconies and cabins that make the interiors look more like a ship than a plane, it has to rate as one of the most imaginative aircrafts ever conceived for a motion picture, adding some delightful to kookiness to what otherwise might be a rather ordinary tale. The special effects are pretty remarkable for 1937 too - both inside and outside of the plane. Of course, it feels a little odd to talk so much about the plane and so little about the rest of the movie, but given the choice of title, it seems clear that the producers also knew that the plane was their best asset here.

*Spoiler/plot- Nonstop New York, 1937. An English performer is in the USA for work during her recent lay-off, she accidentally gets connected to a murder of a prominent mob lawyer and she sees who kills him. A unemployed man is arrested and convicted for the murder in New YorK. The innocent man is sentenced to death. A worldwide petition radio announcement asks for the English girl witness to contact the defense team to save this man's life from the death house. While she returns home, the crooks are sent to England to make sure she does not come back to the USA to testify. She enlists the help of Scotland Yardcomes back to the USA by airplane, and she saves the day.*Special Stars- John Loder, Anna Lee, Francis L. Sullivan.*Theme- good honest people helping other is it's own reward.*Trivia/location/goofs- B & W. British. The trans Altanic Clipper amphibious plane is similar to Howard Hughes 'Spuce Goose' aircraft design.*Emotion- Although this film is NOT science fiction, it is a first rate murder mystery. It has many twists and turns in it's plot and is well produced. This film is very much like some of the film noir Hitchcock films of this time.

Robert Stevenson (1905-1986) was a superb British director, but his name is not widely enough recognised. He is probably most famous for JANE EYRE (1944) with Orson Welles and TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS (1940). Less well known are his excellent DISHONORED LADY (1947, see my review), and his truly magnificent OWD BOB (1938, see my review), which he made the year after this. In this year, he also made KING SOLOMON'S MINES with Anna Lee, who stars once again in this film of his. This really is a most fascinating film, because of the spectacular second half which takes place on a trans-Atlantic Clipper seaplane, the interior of which resembles that of a zeppelin, on multiple levels with individual sleeping compartments, bar and restaurant. It even has a little balcony where people stand outside to take the air and look down upon the ships which are not far below them. Francis L. Sullivan here gives one of his finest performances as the oiliest and least scrupulous of villains, truly hair-raising in his wickedness. Anna Lee is a typical 1930s English 'sweetie', but with more fibre and character than is usual for that time, and she handles the part of the courageous accidental heroine very well. She is determined to save the wrong man from being executed in America for a crime he did not commit. Anna stows away on the Clipper to get back to America to give her evidence, which Scotland Yard had refused to take seriously. This is very much a Hitchcock-style suspense thriller, and makes excellent viewing. It deserves to be more widely known, as it is certainly a British pre-War classic. If Britain had as many film buffs as there are in America, where almost any trivial B or C movie can achieve fame nowadays, films like this would be familiar and praised, rather than obscure and forgotten. But the British are lazy about their cinematic heritage, and films like this are never shown on British television, so no one even knows they exist. In this film, the child actor Desmond Tester is most amusing as an eccentric child musical prodigy who becomes entangled in the murderous intrigues going on aboard the Clipper plane. If only British films still produced wonderfully strange character actors like that! It was also amusing to see a young Peter Bull scowling with his heavy jowls as a blackmailer in this film. In real life, he was actually rather jolly, although extraordinarily bombastic and often too loud, and he was always available for a chat when he ran his astrological shop in Notting Hill Gate in the 1960s and 1970s.

Anna Lee plays a woman in New York who sees a strange man before a murder is committed. John Loder plays the innocent man who is sent to Sing Sing for the murder the mystery man committed. When Lee finds out about it (she's in London now) she rushes back to New York to save the innocent man after the local London police won't forward her story to the American authorities. Thus the title, and the unusual sight of a gigantic flying Clipper ship that gives this film its curio value. The movie itself is an implausible Hitchcock-lite mystery-thriller, but the giant passenger plane IS interesting. It features six engines and two floors with staterooms and the whole lot, reminiscent of a Zeppelin type of luxury. Hard to imagine how these people could handle turbulence! Francis L. Sullivan is the familiar burly villain, reminiscent of an airship-sized George Sanders. The most absurd element of this film, aside from that fantasy airplane, is the notion that all the main suspects in the previous murder just happen to be aboard that same plane on the same flight. Still, it has its moments.