by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Forced
Landing, a truly weird 1941 movie
from Paramount’s “B” production team of William Pine and William Thomas (though
the version we were watching was a TV reissue from something called
“Screencraft Pictures,” which cut their own logo in during the opening credits
and thus messed up a potentially powerful sequence in which the credits were
supposed to be superimposed over the image of a burning plane). The film begins
ahead of the credits — an unusual effect for 1941 — and shows a plane catching
fire in mid-air and its pilot making a (you guessed it) forced landing; he
manages to get his plane down and escape from the burning wreckage, only to be
shot by a mystery man we see only from behind. Then we get the credits, and
then a title establishing the setting as somewhere called “Mosaque,” supposedly
an island nation in the South Pacific but actually made up from Paramount’s
standing sets of Latin American scenes and populated with a weird assortment of
character actors doing a mad mélange of “ethnic” voices, from Latin American to Russian to Asian to just
about everything else. The star is Richard Arlen, playing Dan Kendall, an
American pilot who’s been hired by the military government that rules Mosaque
to fly in what little they have of an air force — only when he arrives he’s
told that he’s being transferred to Mosaque’s civilian air transport. This
discomfits him because the last two pilots who’ve taken up Mosaque’s civilian transport
planes have both disappeared — one of them was Petchnikoff (Harold Goodwin),
the man who recruited Dan and whom we saw doing his forced landing and getting
shot in the pre-credits sequence.
One of Mosaque’s more colorful inhabitants is
Andros Banchek (J. Carrol Naish, attempting to do all the accents suggested by the character’s name),
who’s supposedly an outlaw and a bandit but is really a revolutionary leader trying to overthrow
Mosaque’s military government. Dan also has a comic-relief mechanic, Christmas
(Mikhail Rasumny, obviously channeling Akim Tamiroff), and he’s ready to bail on the whole Mosaque
job until he meets and instantly falls in love with Johanna Van Deuren (a young
and genuinely pretty Eva Gabor in her film debut, playing an odd cross between
Ingrid Bergman and Sonja Henie) even though she’s the fiancée of Col. Jan Golas
(Nils Asther), the right-hand man to Mosaque’s military leader. Needless to
say, Col. Golas is the real baddie; though ostensibly part of the government
he’s actually attempting to stage a coup of his own and freeze both his fellow junta members and the rebels out of power. To do this
he’s determined to sabotage the construction of a fort —which he accomplishes
by blowing up the planes that are supposed to be carrying the gold to pay the
workers who are building it. Only the supposed “gold” boxes really contain
bombs that blow up the planes in mid-air — something Dan fortuitously realizes
when Johanna stows away in the cargo hold of his plane and notices the box emitting
smoke — and the film ends with Golas dead, his co-conspirators executed, the
government offering an amnesty to the rebels and Dan returning to the U.S. with
Johanna as his new bride.
Forced Landing isn’t much of a film — and one could tell that screenwriters Maxwell
Shane and Edward Churchill (no relation, I presume) were trying to thread the
needle on this one, drawing on World War II for plot material as much as they
could get away with without pissing off (and pissing away) the audience in a
still largely isolationist country — but it’s well written and imaginatively
directed by Gordon Wiles, who along with cinematographer John Alton throws the
whole armamentarium of film
noir — shadowy chiaroscuro lighting, oblique angles and the like — at a story
that doesn’t have the moral ambiguity of real noir but benefits from the atmospherics anyway. It’s
also nice to see that Eva Gabor wasn’t always a caricature, though Evelyn Brent (identified in
the official credits as “Housekeeper” and by imdb.com as “Brunet Who Turns In
Andros”) was so minimally present in the film that I missed her almost
completely, a sorry fate for the actress who had preceded Marlene Dietrich as
Josef von Sternberg’s favorite and had turned in similarly subtle, understated
performances in his films.
