Thu 20 Dec 2018
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: 13 HOURS BY AIR (1937).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[4] Comments
13 HOURS BY AIR. Paramount Pictures, 1937. Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett, Zasu Pitts, John Howard, Brian Donlevy, Alan Baxter, Fred Keating, Ruth Donnelly, Adrienne Martin, Benny Bartlett. Screenplay Bogart Rogers, based on his story “Wild Wings†with Frank Mitchell Dazey. Directed by Mitchell Leisen.
A bit different than what you might expect from director Leisen, though he often did films about flying or flyers (Arise My Love).
This is an early aviation film with the usual Grand Hotel cast, first Captain Jack Gordon (MacMurray) meets Felice Rollins (Joan Bennett) desperate to get a ticket on the flight to San Francisco. Of course he can’t resist helping even when he sees a headline about a woman in a fur coat who held up a jewelry store with two men.
Add to the passenger list Zasu Pitts as the high-strung nanny to wealthy young Waldemar Pitt III (Benny Bartlett, billed as Binnie Bartlett), a small handful of ill manners and painful tricks, then a mysterious Dr. Evarts (Brian Donlevy), the nosy Mr. Palmer (Alan Baxter), and a foreign fellow threatening Felice (Fred Keating), plus co-pilot John Howard and stewardess Adrienne Martin who just got engaged.
The usual comedic misdirection abounds, and this one almost falls into the runaway heiress genre of screwball comedy, with Bennett and MacMurray both veterans of such lighter fare, but then the plane is forced down in bad weather in a snowy field, and it turns out there is a killer on board willing to sacrifice everyone so he can escape to Mexico.
No surprises here. Waldemar proves his worth, MacMurray gets the girl, and the bad guy gets decked while all the romantic entanglements get explained simply as soon as everyone stops playing cute and just talk to each other. Leisen often combined comedy and drama in his films.
Granted the model work is distractingly crude, though good for the time, but aside from that I’m a sucker for these closed world films whether on a train, a plane, or ship, and this one boasts an unusually good cast and a solid plot that, while slight, gets by on good dialogue and the quality of the players. It plays like one of the better stories of this sort that appeared in the slicks and the pulps of the period, and is a good example of a genre that writers such as Ernest K. Gann and Arthur Hailey would push to the bestseller list and would be adapted into memorable films later.
Better than average fare in a genre that would become a staple in the decades that followed.
December 21st, 2018 at 3:31 am
Strikes me as the sort of thing Leisen could do very well.
December 21st, 2018 at 11:35 am
Wow, a forerunner to not only John Wayne’s The High And The Mighty, those all star disaster films by Irwin Allen, and the parodies, but you can even see elements of the sci fi film Pitch Black.
December 21st, 2018 at 8:57 pm
There are a few in this sub-genre in the thirties and forties, the most famous being John Farrow’s FIVE CAME BACK, often cited as the best B film ever made. This one hits all the marks, and like the Farrow film benefits from an all star cast.
I was reminded a bit of a Philip Wylie novella from AMERICAN MAGAZINE that was reprinted in an anthology of mystery novellas by Wylie, Charteris, Kelly Roos, and others from that slick and Lester Dent’s fifties novel DEAD AT TAKE OFF.
Whether plane, ship, bus, or train this genre usually works well on film and in print, you could come up with a fair film festival of movies of these films and stories and books with everyone from Graham Greene to Agatha Christie and Carol Reed to Hitchcock.
December 22nd, 2018 at 7:02 am
I’d never heard of this movie. Thank you for telling us about it.
I also was reminded of Wylie’s novella. It’s “Death Flies East” (1934).
It’s reprinted in the anthology American Murders (1986) edited by Jon L. Breen and Rita A. Breen, a collection of mystery novellas from The American Magazine.
My website includes a list of prose mysteries from the 1930’s set on airplanes:
http://mikegrost.com/abbott.htm#PlaneMystery