Flight to Nowhere

Golden Gate Pitchas presents.... Flight to NoWhere. At the very beginning, we witness a murder. don't know what, where, or why. seems to be over uranium. Mysterious lady with an accent calling herself a Countess, hires a charter pilot to bring them to Death Valley. She seems a little reluctant to answer questions. all very mysterious. Story jumps all over the place. Stars Alan Curtis as "Carrington" and Micheline Cheirel, the Countess, who may or may not be who she says she is. Alan Curtis died young at 43... complications from surgery. he played Philo Vance in a couple of the chapters, right after making THIS film. It's all very "B" movie.. the acting, the editing, the sound and picture quality. and the script -- the Countess is scared and asks for help, and suddenly he must kiss her?? where did THAT come from? and Carrington's ex wife pops up out of no-where, and knows the Countess. all pretty random. Directed by William Rowland. he only directed ten films, but seems to have produced many more during his career. couldn't find much info on Rowland or on Golden Gate Pictures... looks like GGP made six films. it's mildly amusing, but quite flawed. Needed a better script, editor, and director.

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.

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.

A charter pilot gets mixed up with some stolen nuclear secrets and a few baddies that want to get there hands on these secrets. The pilot and the bad guys play a game of "hot potato" with the prized envelope as it's passed (or stolen) from one person to the next - over and over. It's all handled in the most excruciatingly dull manner imaginable. Seriously, I could barely hold my eyes open. And for a movie that runs at something like 75 minutes, that's not a good sign.

Beyond the wretched screenplay, I could go on and on with the problems I had with Flight to Nowhere. The laundry list would go something like this: It's cheap with poor lighting and even worse cinematography. Everything looks horrible. Even the music feels cheap. The sets are bargain basement and some of the acting is laughably bad. I know this wasn't a big budget, "A" film, but I've seen a lot of "B" movies that looked a million times better than this. Overall, a 3/10 for Flight to Nowhere is being generous.

One final thought - how many hits to the head can one man take? Our pilot hero should be suffering from a horrible case of post-concussion syndrome. There's no way I would trust him in the air with the repeated head trauma he suffers in this movie.

Somewhere in the South Pacific there is a large supply of uranium that governments are keen to get their hands on. There is a great poster for this espionage mystery containing the picture of an atomic explosion and a cryptic piece about a ring that holds something valuable. That ring turns out to belong to Cathy (Evelyn Ankers) as a gift from her brother who sponges off her after she has inherited the family fortune. Hobe Carrington (Alan Curtis) is a fresh civilian flying charter flights in his Lockheed plane. He is hired by a 'countess' for a weekend that he had intended to keep for himself but her offer becomes too tempting for him to refuse. She springs other passengers on him at the last moment including Cathy and her brother Claude. The story continues in Death Valley where Hobe gets knocked out a few times as he realizes he is in the company of spies and racketeers. He doesn't know who he can trust which gets worse when his ex-wife turns up and reveals something about the past of the 'countess.' The plot gets untidy which is a pity because there are some sinister characters present who would have become really intriguing in a better production. This one and only release from Golden Gate Pictures has some locational interest going for it. Las Vegas can be seen when it was sparsely populated and there are some desert and ranch scenes filmed on the Iverson Movie Ranch where many famous screen cowboys once roamed.