Film review – Jet Over the Atlantic (1959)

Jet Over the Atlantic (1959)

‘I am Sir Robert Leverett.  I’ve had quite a bit of experience with planes.  I thought perhaps if you’d let me hold your little girl.  She’s so very young.  I thought I might comfort her!’
‘Of course.  I’m very grateful.  Darling, this nice man wants to hold you for a little while!’

In Cy Endfield’s Jet Storm, Richard Attenborough fixes a bomb to the wing of a transatlantic jet in order to murder the hit and run driver who killed his little daughter – and incidentally himself, his wife, and a bunch of passengers and crew.  That was far fetched but at least the film tried hard to be credible – this has a related premise (sort of – everything in the Irving H. Cooper scropt is half-baked, even including the title since it’s set on a prop plane) but goes out of its way not to make any sense or to withhold vital info.

Sir Robert Leverett (George Macready) is grieving for the death of his little daughter – for which he feels responsible, but no details are given – and this prompts him to put an incendiary in a trunk belonging to his wife (Anna Lee) as they fly from Spain to Idlewild (the whole film was made in Mexico), which not only sets a big fire in the hold but releases a deadly gas which selectively kills vital crewmembers and very very minor characters while leaving the leads alive to cope with the crisis or keep their own subplots churning.  Why this plane?  Why any plane?  How come the mature Sir Robert even had a moppet kid – or was this a long time ago?  The creepiest bit comes on the plane where, in another Jet Storm parallel, the sad old maniac takes an interest in a good little girl who reminds him of his dead daughter and has the exchange quoted above.  Yes, the mad bomber wants to hug a cute little girl moments before she and everyone else aboard is killed by his slow-release toxin.

Sort of sci-fi Louis Forbes music plays when the film cuts back to the hold, and what looked like a sprinkled five ounces of powder turns into a hundred gallons of foaming sludge thanks to the fire and the extinguisher.  Also on board are a bighead opera diva (Ilona Massey) and her cowed assistant (Mary Anderson) and a gossipy featherhead spinster (Argentina Brunetti) and a woman (Venetia Stevenson) en route to see her father for the first time in fifteen years who strikes up a relationship with a handsome doctor (Brett Halsey) who’s just inherited 25 million dollars.

The leads, however, are ex-bomber pilot Brett Mattoon (Guy Madison), who’s David Kimbled his way out of a bum murder conviction and just got engaged to hotcha dancer Jean (Virginia Mayo) in Madrid, and Stafford (George Raft), the FBI agent who’s vowed to take him back to the States to be hung or electrocuted (opinions vary).  Brett has just obtained a Spanish wedding license and the couple are due to elope, but when he’s picked up by Stafford the deal’s off … so Jean puts a coat over her fishnets-and-corset stage costume and heads to the airport, getting a seat on the very same doomed plane.  When word gets out that there’s a killer on board, the spinster snoops – only she hears the sad frame-up/stalled marriage scheme and talks the Dean of St Swithin’s (Frederick Worlock) into performing an in-flight wedding … and the diva gives up her state room to the couple.  Stafford see-saws between gun-happy Lieutenant Gerard and fairy godfather, alternately giving his prisoner unbelievable liberties and risking everyone’s lives to prevent escape – at one point, Stafford fires into a crowd of fleeing passengers and luckily wings Mattoon rather than friendly-fires a steward.  Leverett is killed in a shoot-out before he can explain anything and, of course, Mattoon has to land the plane despite the sabotaged radio and lingering poison gas.

Maybe the most ridiculous air disaster movie until the Airport series really got desperate, Jet Over the Atlantic is full of stuff like taking the plane down to a lower altitude and smashing some windows to get rid of the gas – which, to be fair, doesn’t stop the dying.  In Jet Storm, the plane had onboard oxygen.  Either this is an older model plane or Cooper didn’t bother with any elementary research.  Only a few years on from The War of the Worlds and The Naked Jungle, Byron Haskin’s career had declined to the point where he was stuck with shoddy material like this – things turned round for him with Robinson Crusoe on Mars and some great Outer Limits episodes.