FLIGHT TO HONG KONG (1956)

This budgeted black-and-white crime drama was directed and produced by Joseph M. Newman of, This Island Earth, fame. Newman finished his career in television. There are no dull moments in this eighty-eight-minute film as it leaps from, as one poster puts it, the “sin-capitals of the world” from Hong Kong to Tangiers, Macao, Tokyo, and San Francisco in an effort to keep the lead actor in business and alive. A Sabre Productions film, it was formed by associate producer, Victor Orsatti, and distributed by United Artists. Orsatti would later join Rory Calhoun to help form Rorvic Productions. The forgettable music score is composed by Albert "B-movie" Glasser. In mock-documentary fashion, the film initially opens with a British officer explaining the worldwide effort to bring crime syndicates to justice. Not a bad film, just a quickly forgotten one. But it is well cast and acted, with Calhoun a charming scoundrel. Unfortunately, the dialogue was obtained from a folder marked, “Movie Clichés.”

Handsome and self-confident, Calhoun is a lady magnet. No one knows this better than himself. He comes off as a respectable businessman in the skeptical “import-export” business on his flight to Hong Kong. That is what he tells his fellow passenger, the equally charming, Barbara Rush, as a bestselling author. They hit it off like two college seniors who imagine each might be “the one.” The airliner is transporting industrial diamonds and is hijacked for this very reason. This comes as no surprise to Calhoun, the mastermind behind it. The plane is forced to land on an abandoned runway, totally disrupting everyone's dinner plans. In subsequent happenstances, when he and Rush meet, Calhoun is mysteriously called away on “business.” Unsuspecting, he becomes the central character for her next novel. Calhoun becomes more undependable by the week which is no surprise to his long-time girlfriend, Delores Donlon.

No longer working on his own, Calhoun has become an operative for a crime cartel. Things have gone swimmingly for him, but there is hanzi on the wall that his carefree life may be hampered by his personal elimination. His fellow operative, Pat Conway, would like nothing better. With Calhoun's confidence at an all-time high, he decides to freelance. Never do that to the boss of a crime syndicate. Calhoun's fear and desperation increase as the film progresses. He fakes his own kidnapping, then double-crosses the syndicate in a savvy display of violence by rigging a ceiling fan with a grenade taped to the top of each blade. When the fan is turned on, the connected string tightens and sets off the mortal blasts. He is assumed dead among the gang members. Calhoun departs with an alias and a million dollars in diamonds. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the report of Calhoun's demise has been highly exaggerated.

Constantly on the run, he racks up a lot of frequent flier miles and pockets full of airline peanuts. An entire year later he tracks down Rush in San Francisco and crashes a party thrown by her publisher on behalf of her latest book success, "The Calhoun Story." In an understatement, she is surprised. Especially by his acknowledgment that he has a new identity. He thought she would find that pretty cool. To his surprise, she has moved on with someone else. Personally embarrassed, Calhoun storms off, wandering the streets of San Francisco in search of a safety plan as the gangsters close in. A loyal friend gets him passage on a steamer back to Hong Kong. He contacts his life-long mentor, played by Soo Yong, and also reunites with Donlon. Calhoun's realization that his diamond-filled briefcase has brought nothing but trouble, he attempts to give it back to Conway and walk free. Knowing what he knows, however, they cannot let him go “unattended.”

Note: One of my old movie pet peeves is transportation continuity. Airliners seem to provide the most problems. Low-budget films are notorious offenders. Accessing ideal stock footage can be understandably difficult or expensive. However, I do not understand why it happened so frequently. Padding the film's length perhaps. In most cases, a transitional scene to another location would suffice. These editing details are sometimes blatantly obvious. The poor continuity in this film is a good example. Under the opening titles, we are witness to stock footage of a Pan American Stratocruiser in flight and its landing. The film's director takes over to finish the journey from Tokyo to Hong Kong on a fictitious airline called, “East Asiatic Airways.” Acceptable, but during the flight, the plane morphs into a United Airlines airliner and then lands in Hong Kong as a Pan American DC-6. All those changes with not one passenger missing their boarding gate. Locating their luggage is a different story.