Wings of Danger

The first Hammer noir I saw was the excellent Hell is a City; and it's a good job too because if the first one I saw was one of the ones I saw after Hell is a City, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching any more! Wings of Danger is directed by Hammer veteran Terence Fisher, who also directed the disappointing Hammer noir The Stranger Came Home. This one is actually slightly better, but there's not a lot in it. Wings of Danger focuses on cargo plane pilot Richard Van Ness. He tries to stop another pilot from flying due to the weather, but is blackmailed into allowing it. The plane crashes and this leads the police to begin questioning Richard about his own affairs. The film is very short at only seventy minutes, and I do have to say that's a good thing because any longer and I've have gotten really tired of it. The plot is always at least fairly interesting and the film does manage to present a handful of interesting characters. The dialogue can be a little suspect at times, but that's not such a bad thing as it's often unintentionally comedic. The film holds the audience's interest for the duration and boils down to an interesting and satisfying conclusion. Overall, I really wouldn't recommend this film, though I wouldn't say it's awful either.

Zachary Scott comes over from across the pond to star in this British noir film about a pilot investigating the crash of another pilot whom he supervised that he let go up in a storm over the English Channel. As it turned out Scott was between a rock and a hard place, he has to let Robert Beatty fly because Beatty knows that Scott suffers from occasional blackouts and the Board of Trade wouldn't like that if they heard about it.

Why does Beatty go up. The more Scott digs on his own he uncovers, blackmail, counterfeiting, and smuggling. And a few more surprises before this film ends.

Although Hammer Films before it started doing horror films and became known for same, they turned out some decent low budget noir films that the British call quota quickies. This isn't one of them it drags in many spots and such talented folk as those already mentioned are wasted. Even Kay Kendall who plays the gangster's moll in this and well doesn't spark this film at all.

I think most will be bored with this one.

Zachary Scott stars with Robert Beatty and Kay Kendall in a 1952 British quota film, "Dead on Course."

During the '50s, many American actors went to Britain and made these films: Cesar Romero, Dane Clark, Dennis O'Keefe, and others. Some are better than others, but mostly, like this one, are fairly routine.

Scott plays Richard Van Ness, part of an airline service. His girlfriend's brother, Nick (Beatty) insists on flying in bad weather in order to deliver unimportant cargo.

Van Ness tries to ground him, but Nick threatens to tell their boss that Van Ness has intermittent blackouts, which will ground him.

Nick's plane crashes near the Channel Islands under odd circumstances. The police ask Van Ness for help, telling him of a smuggling operation that they've connected with the airline. Van Ness pays a visit to his boss' girlfriend (Kay Kendall) and acts interested in order to find out what he can.

One of the plot points seemed obvious from the beginning; it was just a feeling I had but somehow, it was telegraphed in the script.

The acting is so-so, with Robert Beatty quite charming and Kay Kendall a good femme fatale. Kendall was a rising star who married Rex Harrison after they did a play together in 1955; when he realized she was dying of leukemia, Harrison divorced his current wife, Lili Palmer, and married Kendall.

Kendall did not realize she was terminally ill. Their story was the basic plot for a Terence Rattigan play, "In Praise of Love," which Harrison did on Broadway with Julie Harris.

Zachary Scott said all of his lines in a very aggressive manner, absolutely no shading. I always liked him -- he was good as a sleaze, a weak man, a Henry Fonda-ish role in The Southerner - here he just seems hostile all the way through.

Just okay.

"Dead on Course" is sort of like an American film noir movie but made in the UK. And, like many European films from the 1950s, they lured an American actor (Zachary Scott) to star in the film-- presumably to give the film greater international marketability. Unfortunately, it's still a relatively bland film.

Richard (Zachary Scott) is a pilot working for his small air transport company. His friend, Nick, knows Richard's secret--that he occasionally blacks out due to some old injury! So using this as leverage, Nick takes off in a plane during crappy weather---and the plane crashes. What follows is a dark story involving smugglers and Richard trying to sort out who his real friends are.

The best thing about this film is Zachary Scott and his dialog. It's pure noir--and works very well. But the rest of the cast all seem very dreary--with limp dialog and an almost complete lack of menace. Not terrible...just not all that interesting.

When charismatic Nick Talbot (second billed Robert Beatty) disappears after flying into a storm after his partner Richard Van Ness (gravel-voiced Zachary Scott) has ordered the plane to be grounded, it seems not unlikely that (a) he's up to no good and (b) that we'll see him again before the movie's over. Made on a shoestring at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith but supposedly mainly set in Guernsey, this is quite a clever thriller with lively dialogue, though Richard's liability to black out when flying is too irrelevant. For nostalgic film buffs it's good to see naughty lady Kay Kendall a year before her breakthrough performance in 'Genevieve', Diane Cilento (at one time Mrs Sean Connery) as Nick's fiancée and camp Harold Lang as a blackmailer, but Naomi Chance is a boring heroine. I'd lost track of the malarkey before the end, but the finale has action and excitement.