Sky Liner (Lippert Pictures, Screen Guild International, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 22) I ran my husband Charles a vest-pocket thriller from Lippert Pictures in 1949 called Sky Liner (two words), directed by William Berke in much the same manner as the later films in the Falcon series he directed at RKO in the mid-1940’s. I was a bit worried from the imdb.com description – “FBI Agent Steve Blair (Richard Travis) finds himself caught up in Cold War espionage when he boards a plane heading west. Some sensitive papers have disappeared and Steve must keep tabs on a suspect without giving himself away” – that it would turn out to be a rancid bit of flag-waving anti-Cold War propaganda, but writers John Wilste and Maurice Tombragel blessedly kept the patriotic chest-beating to a minimum. Most of the film takes place aboard an airliner, and it’s one of those thrillers that’s set aboard a confined space, so when one of the passengers is murdered, everyone who could have killed him is aboard the plane. The murder victim is a young courier (Allan Hersholt) who’s on his way to an important political conference carrying sealed orders that are not to be opened until he arrives. We know from the get-go who killed him: Bokejian (Steven Geray), a diplomat from another country who’s just signed a secret treaty with the United States and who’s after the sealed orders. Bokejian buys them from the courier but then finds out that they’re just blank pieces of paper with the State Department letterhead.

The fake orders were part of a State Department and FBI plot to nail Amy Winthrop (Rochelle Hudson, the quite beautiful actress who in the 1930’s played supporting roles for Mae West and W. C. Fields; she’s the woman in West’s She Done Him Wrong who’s lost her virginity ahead of schedule, and to whom West gives these marvelous words of reassurance: “Don’t worry; when women go wrong, men go right after ’em!”), whom they suspect of being a foreign spy. There are at least two other criminals on the flight: a jewel thief who just murdered one of New York’s top gem dealers when the victim caught the killer burglarizing his safe; and a man who impersonates Mr. George Eakins (John McGuire), Amy Winthrop’s employer, after he clubbed the real Eakins to death in his office the night before the flight took off and then stole the real Eakins’s cash stash. One of the surprises of this film is that the plane depicted is a Lockheed Constellation, with its iconic three tail fins instead of the usual one – though the fact that the plane is still driven by propellers instead of jets really dates this movie (as does the cigarette vending machine in the airport). What makes it even more ironic is that the airline flying the plane is the very real TWA, which at the time this movie was made was owned outright by Howard Hughes. When Hughes bought RKO studios in 1948, just about every time an RKO film featured a commercial airliner, it was from TWA – but it was a surprise to see a TWA plane in a non-RKO film from this period.

The Constellation has an interesting backstory: Hughes actually designed the plane personally, but then ran afoul of federal regulations that forbade airlines from flying planes their owners built. So Hughes licensed the design to Lockheed with the promise that he’d buy enough of them they’d turn a profit on the aircraft from Hughes’s orders alone. (Later the Constellation was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration after it was involved in a number of plane crashes in the 1960’s.) Ultimately FBI agent Blair uses his federal credentials to force the plane to land at the military base in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, despite the protests of the pilots who say it’s too foggy to land there. He wants to offload the body of the murder victim so he and the other good guys will know how he was killed. Later Blair also wants the plane to land at Burbank instead of L.A., but one of the crooks on board pulls a gun on him (the lack of any pre-boarding passenger screening is yet another item that dates this movie big-time!) and forces him to countermand his own order and have the plane land at “Municipal” (presumably what is now known as LAX). Ultimately Bokejian and Winthrop are arrested and Blair starts chatting up the young, attractive flight attendant (they were still called “stewardesses” then) Carol (Pamela Blake) and asks her for a date while they’re both in L.A. There’s also Smith (Gaylord Pendleton), a stuffy British diplomat on the plane who chats up Bokejian, and Mary Ann (Anna May Slaughter), a child movie star obviously, shall we say, “inspired” by Shirley Temple, as well as a young straight couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jennings (Roy Butler and Jean Clark), who have an argument when he gets airsick but doesn’t want to admit it.

Sky Liner is no great shakes as a movie, though at least Wilste and Tombragel showed some ingenuity in their choice of a murder weapon – a trick fountain pen with a needle and secret compartment containing the deadly poison curare – and it’s likable and blessedly subtle in its political finger-pointing. Only in one scene, in which Blair is openly speculating on what made Amy Winthrop turn traitor – was it for money or a misguided loyalty to a bad political cause? – does Sky Liner start to breathe the foul air of the unfortunate explicitly anti-Communist political pieces of that era.