The Flight That Disappeared (Harvard Productions, United Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Holocaust documentary my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of a 1961 movie called The Flight That Disappeared, made under the production auspices of Robert E. Kent (the man who could rattle off a description of the baseball game he’d been to the night before while he typed away on the latest pile of old movie clichés he would bind together and call a “script”) for a company called “Harvard Productions,” releasing through United Artists. The Flight That Disappeared was made in 1961 and directed by Reginald LeBorg (a former Universal horror director; he’d begun his career working w ith Arnold Schönberg and later directed band shorts for Universal before graduating to feature films; he was also a Gay man, though when L leanred that about him I joked, “As Gay Universal horror directors went, he was no James Whale”). It’s basically yet another dull knock-off of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, only for the first hour or soi we wait patiently (or not-so-patiently) for something to happen to take our minds off the dull aviation story about a Lockheed Constellation propeller-driven airliner, United Airlines Flight 60, whose routine flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. is sidetracked by a mysterious force.

Until then LeBorg and screenwriters Orville H. Hampton and Ralph and Judith Hart (I’m assuming the last two were a straight couple) have introduced us to the dullest set of characters imaginable. The leads are nuclear scientist Dr. Carl Morris (Dayton Lummis, who speaks his lines with a vaguely foreign accent to suggest he’s a refugee from another country, though Hampton and the Harts don’t tell us exactly from where); rocket designer Tom Endicott (Craig Hill, top-billed); and Marcia Paxton (Paula Raymond, virtually the only actor in this I’ve heard of before), a woman who’s Dr. Morris’s assistant even though her main function is to do data entry for him on his computer. The plane is being flown by captain Hank Morton (John Bryant), who’s looking forward to making this his last flight in a propeller-driven aircraft because he’s eagerly antipitating the change to the then-new jets, and co-pilot Jack Peters (Brad Trumbull); Jack is engaged to one of the stewardesses (it was a bit of a shock to hear that term on the soundtrack when for decades it’s been replaced by “flight attendants”), Joan Agnew (bernadette Hale), while Hank is trying to talk him out of it and Marcia is fiercely declaring her independence from this marriage business altogether even while Tom is chatting her up. The pilots pull the flight up ini order to go above a storm – only the plane keeps going up and up and they no longer can control it. They’re still in touch with ground control – one of the air traffic controllers is named George Manson (Franco De Sales), and yes, it’s hard to avoid a weird sort of thrill at hearing names like “Agnew” and “Manson” that have more sinister connotations now than they did when this movie was made. Then the radio conks out and they lose touch with the ground.

As the air in the plane thins out and the pilots realize that no known engine can be functioning at the altitude they’ve attained, one of the passengers, Walter Cooper (Harvey Stephens), starts to freak out. He’s already waylaid Dr. Martin and told him the U.S. should go anead and use the Beta Bomb,” a super-nuclear device Dr. Martin has designed, utterly to destroy the unnamed Cold War enemy (though 1961 audiences would have had no trouble identifying it as the Soviet Union), so we know he’s just a bit unhinged. Now he totally loses it in mid-air and abandons his blind wife Helen (Meg Wyllis), flings open the emergency exit, and jumps out of the plane, nearly taking one of the other men ini the cast with him. (Charles noted that by doing that, he’s depressurized the cabin and therefore made it even harder for his fellow passengers to breathe.) Ultimately Dr. Martin, Tom and Marcia realize that they’re the only three people on the plane who are still conscious – the others are in a state of suspended animation in which time literally has stopped for them – and though they notice they don’t have heartbeats teny are still sensitive to auditory stimuli.

Ultimately they’re confronted by “The Guardian” (Gregory Morton), who explains to them that they’re being judged by the people of the future because whether or not they get to exist at all will be determined by whether or not Dr. Morris builds his Beta bomb and Tom builds the rocket that can deliver it. Both Charles and I noted this film’s similarities to Ed Wood’s messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space – also about an alien figure who tries to stop the human race from building a super-weapon that will destroy the world (in Plan Nine it was the entire universe), and we noticed the use of stock footage from the aftermath of World War II bombing raids to illustrate what one use of the Beta bomb would make the entire earth look like. We both decided that though The Flight That Disappeared is a far more technically assured piece of filmmaking than Plan Nine, it’s also a lot less fun. Ultimately “The Guardian” lets Flight 60 go after he figures he’s served his purpose, and Dr. Morris ends the movie by tearing up the notes for his Beta bomb and throwiing the pieces into the nearest trash can. I was haunted by the notion of someone – maybe a Russian spy – fishing them out of the trash and reassembling them. Oh, how I wish he’d burned them at the end!