Tonight's Movie: Flying Blind (1941)

FLYING BLIND is a Pine-Thomas Production starring Richard Arlen and Jean Parker.

For readers who are new to Pine-Thomas Productions, the company made "B" movies released by Paramount throughout the '40s; in the early '40s the movies most frequently starred varied combinations of Arlen, Parker, Chester Morris, or Nancy Kelly.

The Pine-Thomas movies tend to be on the low end qualitywise, but I enjoy checking out one of the titles every so often; I like Morris and Parker, in particular, and the short running times make it easy to slip one into the schedule.

I enjoy aviation films so I thought FLYING BLIND sounded like fun, but unfortunately it proved to be an especially weak title. The movie couldn't decide if it was a comedy or a drama, and it failed on both counts.

Pilot Jim Clark (Arlen) and stewardess Shirley Brooks (Parker) start up Honeymoon Airlines, a one-plane operation which flies couples from Southern California to Las Vegas to get hitched. Jim takes lovelorn Shirley for granted, so she becomes engaged to Bob (Dick Purcell).

While flying newlyweds (Grady Sutton and Marie Wilson) home from Vegas, the plane is hijacked by enemy spies and crash lands -- then manages to take off again just before a raging forest fire engulfs the plane.

This plot should have been a lot more fun than it was, but the execution was quite poor, making it a long 69 minutes. (As a matter of fact, I think the Alpha DVD ran a little shorter than that -- but it seemed longer!) The movie would have completely keeled over and died without the presence of perky Jean Parker, the movie's one saving grace.

One of the film's oddities is that Parker plays an extended sequence working in the office and talking on the phone while wearing a hat with a veil covering her entire face; the veil is light, but I got to wondering if there was some necessity for the veil, perhaps to mask a problem with Parker's face that shooting day, or if it was just an offbeat wardrobe choice.

FLYING BLIND was directed by Frank McDonald and shot by Fred Jackman Jr. The musical score, believe it or not, was by Dimitri Tiomkin. THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954) this ain't.

The supporting cast included Eddie Quillan, Kay Sutton, Nils Asther, Roger Pryor, Charlotte Henry, and James Seay.

The part of "Boots," the telephone operator, is not listed by IMDb; the character was seen only in profile, and I was trying to figure out if it was Ann Doran. I'm still not sure; perhaps it was Gayle Mellott, who is listed as having a "Bit Role" and was the right age.

Like the other Pine-Thomas movies, FLYING BLIND fell into the public domain. The Alpha DVD, which is a soft but watchable print, can be rented from ClassicFlix.

You can also catch the movie in its entirety on YouTube. Trust me, though, unless one is a Parker fan or there's another good reason to see it, this one is eminently skippable -- something I don't say about many films!

Previous Pine-Thomas films reviewed here are POWER DIVE (1941), which starred Arlen and Parker, NO HANDS ON THE CLOCK (1941) starring Morris and Parker, WRECKING CREW (1942) with Arlen, Morris, and Parker, and DOUBLE EXPOSURE (1944), teaming Morris with Kelly.