• Directed by Terence Fisher
• Written by John Gilling, based on the novel Dead on Course by Elleston Trevor and Packham Webb
• Starring
  • Zachary Scott
  • Robert Beatty
  • Naomi Chance
  • Kay Kendall
  • Colin Tapley
• Produced by Anthony Hinds

Let’s see. In my review of Terror Street (1953), I went over the production deal between American distributor Robert Lippert and the up-and-coming Hammer Films, and how part of the deal was a casting a minor American “name” star in an an otherwise British cast. So I guess we can go right into the discussion of the movie itself, can’t we?

This time out, the American star is Zachary Scott, a debonaire type best known these days for… not much, really. He started acting in 1944 with the lead in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), and starred in a string of movies through the ’40s which were well-received at the time, but rarely watched these days. A divorce and a bad injury sustained in a rafting accident in 1950 put the brakes on his career, and although he worked constantly in movies and television until his death in the mid-’60s, he never achieved the stardom that his earlier career seemed to herald. In other words, if you don’t recognize the only actor that audiences were supposed to be familiar with, it’s not your fault.

“Sorry, but it’s going to take a little more than flowers this time, Nick.”

Scott here playes Richard Van Hess, known to his friends as “Van,” a former Air Force pilot now working in Britain as one of the two pilots for a small freight airline. The other pilot, Nick (Robert Talbot), is a former Brit pilot and Van’s wartime buddy, though much more of a happy-go-lucky carouser than the serious Van. Nick’s sister Avril (Naomi Chance) is also Van’s main squeeze, though he’s been reticent about tying the knot and making it permanent, for a reason that only he and Nick know: Van has occasional, unpredictable blackouts, but he’s not willing to stop flying, and thus doesn’t want to doom Avril to an eventual future as a young widow.

Can I insert a non-spoiler here? This whole blackout angle could be a fruitful dramatic angle for getting our protagonist into trouble or putting him under suspicion for a plot-driving crime. Instead, it’s almost entirely unused; Van blacks out exactly once in a scene that seems more more designed to justify adding it as a plot complication than anything smacking of good storytelling; all it does it wreck a car and spoil a pursuit, and even that doesn’t amount to much. Van could just as easily have been saddled with a congenital heart defect or some other problem which would explain his standoffishness toward marriage. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why get married if Avril’s willing to pour the coffee for free, if you know what I mean. (I don’t.)

And as long as I’m speaking out of turn, I’d like to say that Nick and Avril sound nothing like siblings; I’m not an accent expert who can pinpoint a Brit’s hometown within ten miles, but Nick sounds more like a product of one (or all) of the non-English parts of Britain, while Avril speaks with almost regal refinement. Their father (Ian Fleming — no, not THAT one) sounds more like Nick than Avril; maybe he made a point of sending his daughter to a fine finishing school. Or maybe Canadian-born Robert Talbot was doing the only flavor of British accent he could muster. Look, it’s a mystery-suspense film, so I’ve got to think about these mysteries, don’t I?

The plot proper gets underway when Van tries to ground Nick’s scheduled flight on a stormy night. Nick insists on flying out with more than his usual devil-may-care attitude, even though his scheduled flight is only to return an empty plane to its hangar, and even threatens to leak Van’s blackout secret to their employer, Mr. Spencer (Arthur Lane). Nick flies out across the channel… and disappears. After a tense night, wreckage of his tail fins is discovered.

“Don’t make me shake my cummerbund at you!”

That would be bad enough for Van and for Avril. But the next thing Van knows, Customs Inspector Maxwell (Colin Tapley) is snooping around. Maxwell’s quite candid; these small airlines are often conduits for contraband, including U.S. currency — both real and counterfeit. Nick had something of a history in France of getting ahold of things people wanted, and Spencer Airlines is in a position to make good money by smuggling. Van insists that he’s kept his hands clean and that he has no knowledge of anything underhanded Nick may have been involved with, and scoffs at the idea that anything but bad weather contributed to Nick’s demise; but once the Inspector is gone, Nick’s strange insistence on flying an empty plane in bad weather starts weighing on him, so he starts nosing about on his own.

The plot thickens when a smirking man, Snell, (Harold Lang) starts hanging around Avril’s hotel apartment, attracting Van’s attention. (For maximum convenience, the elder Mr. Talbot owns and operates the hotel at which both Avril and Van live; Nick, I think, was too much of a rounder to live under his father’s roof.) Van puts his hooks into Snell and finds out that he was attempting to blackmail Avril with details about Nick’s life. Mr. Talbot wants to remember Nick as a golden innocent; how would the old man take it if he found out about how Nick had made extra money in France during the war… or in the years since?

“Oh jolly good, a toolbox. I was just thinking this morning, ‘If I had a hammer, I would hammer in the morning…’”

Van’s investigations take him to his employer, Spencer, and to his Girl Friday, Alexia (Kay Kendall), a high-living type who’s had her hungry eye on Van for a while. Staying one step ahead of Inspector, Van tries to gather evidence on what Spencer was involved in, hoping to either clear Nick’s name or discover whether there was foul play involved in his plane going down… and while he’s at it, trying to clear himself of whatever suspicions Maxwell still harbors toward him. But wherever he goes, there’s a mysterious man on a motorcycle who always seems to get there first, looking for the same thing Van is looking for…

(yawn)

Oh, I’m sorry. The outline is workable for a suspense thriller, but there’s something definitely missing: jeopardy. For most of the movie, the stakes aren’t that high; Van accepts that Nick’s death was an accident of weather, and thus conducts his investigations mostly to dissuade the Inspector and to keep Nick’s name clear — noble, yes, but hardly high stakes. Until very late in the game, he never seems in danger of running afoul of Mr. Spencer, even when he does start to find evidence of a smuggling conspiracy; and while pumping Alexia for information (no, there’s no double entendre there), his natural suave command keeps the mood almost casual.

“I don’t care how bad the storm is. Your guarantee says 30 minutes or it’s free.”

I can’t help but compare this movie to Terror Street, not only because of their common production origin, but because they’re companion features on a “Hammer Film Noir” double-feature DVD from VCI Entertainment. In just about every metric on which one would rate a crime thriller, Terror Street rates higher: there’s physical jeopardy and high stakes, and the protagonist has a deep emotional need to bring the evildoers to justice. Terror Street wasn’t a great movie, but it was a firecracker compared to Wings of Danger. Probably its greatest historical contribution was to provide one of the dozen training-wheel movies for director Terrence Fisher, before he went on to make many of the horror thrillers for which Hammer later became famous.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• glasses thrown at Van: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0