Flying Blind

Richard Arlen is running a shoestring airline, while trying to avoid the entanglement of getting married to Jean Parker. Meanwhile, buddies of his are working on a top-secret magneto, which Nils Asther is trying to steal. It all ends up with various people crashed in the mountains.

Arlen was working for Pine-Thomas, the Dollar Bills who produced B movies for Paramount. This one is liberally dosed with comic bits that might be funny in other hands, but winds up being merely frantic for most of its length.

Arlen was born in 1899. During the First World War, he served in the Canadian Air force, then kicked around until a motorcycle crash landed him at Paramount, where he starred in WINGS and BEGGARS OF LIFE. Sound started a downslide, and Paramount cut him loose in 1935. He hung on in cheap productions, and his career extended into the 1960s with Geezer Westerns, for a total of almost 150 appearances in features, few of them distinguished. He died in 1976.

My favorite part of this one is Grady Sutton as "Chester". Sutton had worked with W.C. Fields and Katherine Hepburn, so he had sure perfected his timing as the country bumpkin by the time this came around. Richard Arlen stars as pilot Jim Clark, and he quits his job, along with Shirley (Jean Parker) to start his own airline company. When Shirley starts to date other guys, Jim gets jealous and tries to trick the other guy into going out of town for a while. There are spies around, and when someone tries to steal a gadget from the military, it gets more complicated from there. This gets a pretty low rating on imdb, since the sound and picture quality are so bad, but we're probably lucky to have this one around, even in the un-copyrighted version. It's okay. a bit convoluted, which is probably accounts for the low ratings. Showing on Moonlight Movie channel.....

After one dispute too many Richard Arlen quits as a pilot for one airline to start his own. What an idea, Honeymoon Airlines from LA to Las Vegas and back catering to those eloping couples.

Arlen has his usual problems especially romantic ones with girl Friday Jean Parker. But some real ones happen when former pilot Roger Pryor wants a ride and foreign agent Nils Asther has some kind of electronic gizmo he's stolen from the Army Air Corps. We're never quite sure what it is.

Flying Blind has all the silliness of a serial with the narrow escapes of one compacted into a B film. Some really good character players like Grady Sutton, Marie Wilson, and Eddie Quillan are wasted in some rather forced comedy.

This was a Pine-Thomas Production which was Paramount's B picture unit. Arlen was one of many former big box office names they used in the 40s and 50s. Some of the Pine-Thomas films were good. This wasn't one of them.

A commuter airline plane(Honeymoon Airlines)-- consisting of one plane -- that flies couples to Vegas is hijacked by enemy spies to bring a new transformer for bombers across the border to Mexico. Sounds exciting? It isn't. The first half hour is more silly romantic comedy than action movie, and even when the hijack happens, the suspense is minimal, and the characters too dumb to relate to. One, a Boy Scout scoutmaster, actually starts a forest fire; another, a soon-to-be father, falls over everything in a lame attempt at slapstick. The film is a mish-mosh and not a good one.

Strangely, this B film is included in the Combat Pack (20 films)DVD collection available for $10.00 or less. The connection to "combat" or WW II is fleeting, at best.

One interesting note, though: horror film icon Dwight Frye (Renfield in the 1932/Lugosi Dracula has a small but typically over-the-top role as an enemy collaborator.

All in all . . . a yawner.