Identity Unknown

Seems I'm the first to review this film, which was screened on Talking Pictures TV the other day.

A plane has crashed in Switzerland with only three people known to have survived, but their identities are unknown. Back in Fleet Street, an ace reporter is teamed up with a girl journalist to check the backgrounds of all the passengers and crew. (He resents her at first, but you can guess what happens.) Happily everyone lives in or close to London and the duo complete their mission within 24 hours.

They now have a variety of "human stories": the pilot's wife has just had a baby; one passenger is a vital witness who could testify for a crook facing the death penalty; a somewhat elderly would-be foster-mother is about to adopt two new children; a surgeon is needed to perform a complicated operation on a child; there's a drug-smuggler; and a couple more. The rescue party is delayed, so the journalists and interested parties (the crook's lawyer, for example, and the child's parents) all fly out to Switzerland and wait in a chalet.

Then the rescue team arrives, with the three survivors ...

The film passed 90 minutes or so of Lockdown pleasantly enough, but it was hardly brilliant. A passer-by in Fleet Street staring at the camera has been noted in Goofs, and some of the back-projection as the reporters drove along in their car suggested that the following vehicle was almost rubbing bumpers.

All the cast were adequate, except for Pauline Yates, who didn't convince.

This repetitive Danzigers support consists almost entirely of two reporters (Richard Wyler, back in the UK after a Hollywood sojourn, and new star Pauline Yates) interviewing the relatives and colleagues of passengers on a crashed aircraft. Only three unknown people are said to have survived. It turns out that the survivors are generally those who deserved to live. Prolific screenwriter Brian Clemens had a lively mind and is admired for both his TV episodes and films. But it looks as though he knocked this one off in his lunch hour. Why are the police not involved? You get the feeling the Danzigers didn't want to rent the uniforms. How is it that nobody noticed throughout production that a news editor is sitting behind a desk with a sign on it reading "New's"? As a matter of additional interest there are two references here on IMDb to a man in the opening sequence, shot in London's Fleet Street, who stares directly into the camera. That man is not in the version currently showing on the British TV channel Talking Pictures. Is TP actually re-editing films to keep IMDb reviewers happy?

A typical Danzigers production creating bricks without straw with a noisy jazz score, a script by Brian Clemens and a surprisingly large cast of speaking parts liberally sprinkled with familiar faces ranging from intrepid girl reporter Pauline Yates (later Mrs Reginald Perrin on TV during the seventies) to Valentine Dyall as her boss (directing her from a tiny office while fighting a losing battle with an Irish accent).

Basically no expense spared.So most of the film consists of family and friends of the passengers being interviewed by the journalists.Its only in the last few minutes when some tension is injected into the situation that it becomes reasonably interesting