Thirteen Hours by Air
Tags: melodrama

Plot synopsis:
Airline pilot Jack Gordon (Fred MacMurray) on a flight from New York to San Francisco, is immediately attracted to beautiful passenger Felice Rollins (Joan Bennett). Known as a "lady's man", he bets stewardess Vi Johnson (Ruth Donnelly) that he will take Felice out to dinner that evening. A jewel robbery is in the news and a beautiful blonde is implicated, with Jack suspecting that Felice may be the culprit. On a stop over in Chicago, Jack learns instead that his passenger is a wealthy socialite at odds with another passenger, Count Stephani (Fred Keating). Jack worries that he may have a crisis involving the Count when he finds Stephani has a gun aboard. Other passengers include Dr. Evarts (Brian Donlevy) and Curtis Palmer (Alan Baxter, both of whom seem to be harboring a secret.
Felice is trying to get to San Francisco in order to prevent her sister from marrying the Count's brother, but the flight runs into bad weather. Jack and Freddie Scott (John Howard), his co-pilot are persuaded to fly on but are eventually forced to make an emergency landing. Dr. Evarts tells Jack he is a federal agent pursuing Palmer, a notorious criminal, who now takes the opportunity to shoot Freddie and Dr. Everts, commandeering the aircraft. Jack manages to overcome Palmer, and with the help of Felice, is able to take off and fly to San Francisco. When the flight lands, he is able to have his dinner with Felice, collecting his bet, knowing that he will need the money for a marriage licence.

Review: A very satisfying flight.
"Thirteen Hours by Air" is a fun little movie that's quick, surprising, and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Mitchell Leisen, an underrated director, is usually associated with screwball comedy or romantic melodrama, and there's a little of each in this film, but it's a pleasant surprise to see that he can handle a brisk thriller as well.
Like most movies featuring airplane trips, it includes a hodgepodge of characters involved in separate plots, but they blend together nicely, and the script includes a few neat twists that are bound to surprise anyone expecting the usual cliches.
MacMurray and Bennett make an appealing team, ZaSu Pitts is, as usual, a joy, and the various airports are designed in an eye-catching art deco style.
It's not a classic, but it's certainly a much better film than I expected, and it deserves to be rescued from whatever deep, dark closet it has been hidden in for too many years..
Right on schedule.
I've a soft spot for this one – it was one of the first films I saw on my brand new cable TV in 1993, and was unexpectedly impressed with it.
However it's essentially primitive set aboard a primitive "aeroplane" and some would say with primitive acting too.
Youngsters might also ask based on this how did powered flight ever take off?
But it's still engrossing and I think surprisingly satisfying bearing in mind all the technical limitations.United Airlines pilot Fred Macmurray is looking and chasing after blonde with a secret Joan Bennett - while minding his own business - partly to win a bet he made partly because he has the hots for her.
She has to get to San Francisco asap for some flighty reason and some other guy's trying half heartedly to stop her, while doctor Brian Donlevy and a dodgy character make evil eyes at each other and a spoilt brat and his keeper Zasu Pitts slapstick about.
Take my word for it that the dialogue is snappy and almost screwball, of the time and occasionally hilarious – why can't modern movies have endless clean smart ass one liners like this one?
Why can't the heroes in modern movies be too gentlemanly to utter the word "toilet" to the heroines like in this one?It's a well scripted inconsequential little melodrama and if you can get past it being a whodunit set on a papier-mâché plane and with cardboard sets you should have a very pleasant 77 minute journey..
High-flying high jinks.
The title 'Thirteen Hours by Air' seems vaguely science-fictionish, because in 1936 it was simply impossible for an airplane to cross the United States in 13 hours.
(Sixteen was more like it.) But this movie seems to be presenting itself as cutting-edge rather than futuristic.Fred MacMurray, slightly less bland than usual, stars as the pilot of the fastest transcontinental 'ship' available.
He's heading from New York to California, and he's all set for chocks-away when along comes blonde Joan Bennett as an heiress who's eager to hop aboard.
She hasn't a ticket, so she hands him a diamond ring the size of a doorknob.All the passengers aboard the flight are very obvious 'characters', ranging over a wide gamut of types.
This sort of thing works very well if the film is a murder mystery, and we've got to guess which of these suspects is the killer.
(In fact, an airplane in flight would be the perfect setting for a 'locked-room' mystery: Agatha Christie used this in one of her novels, but has anyone ever used it in a movie?) There is just a touch of a mystery here, but it isn't a murder.
After the 'plane is in flight, MacMurray learns that some jewel thieves are on the lam: a blonde and her two henchmen.
Could Bennett be the blonde?
It would explain how she got that diamond ring.Among the passengers aboard the flight are a bratty little boy named Waldemar (whom I was hoping would turn out to be a midget police officer, working undercover) and his nursemaid, played by ZaSu Pitts.
I can tolerate Pitts in small doses, but in this movie her character gets airsick in flight ...
giving Pitts an excuse for an overdose of her annoying fluttery gestures.
I was hoping MacMurray would throw her out of the 'plane over the Rocky Mountains.Oh, yeah.
Among the merry passengers is a gun-toting European nobleman, played by Fred Keating with a bad accent.
There are no end of high-flying high jinks along the way, some of them more plausible than others.
There's an exciting sequence in which the 'plane makes a forced landing in a blizzard.
MacMurray's beleaguered pilot gets some help from an unexpected source ...
although, if you read this review carefully, you'll know who I'm talking about.
Ruth Donnelly is quite good, as usual ...
but there ought to be a law against Brian Donlevy and Dean Jagger ever appearing in the same movie.
Both of these actors had about as much screen presence as a block of wood.
Put them both in the same movie, and they resemble the Petrified Forest.
'Thirteen Hours by Air' is about as implausible as 'Airport', but -- like that extremely manipulative movie -- it manages to be quite entertaining without ever being realistic.
I'll rate this movie 8 out of 10, and I enjoyed the flight..
It Seemed Like Thirteen Hours To Watch.
Pilot Fred MacMurray likes the looks of Joan Bennett (which is the last plot point of this movie I enjoyed).
He takes her flight to San Francisco.
But there's been a jewel robbery, and she's tried to pay for her ticket with a ring.
There are people who want the plane to get to San Francisco and people who don't and are willing to get mean about it.
And pretty soon I didn't care much either way.It's an okay flick directed by Mitchell Leisen, who was always good at the visuals in a movie, and could get a decent performance out of Fred MacMurray.
Anyone could get a decent performance out of Fred MacMurray, since except for two movies directed by Billy Wilder, he played the same character in 86 movies and almost four hundred episodes of MY THREE SONS.
The problem is that this movie reeks of it being Hollywood Danger During The Code Era, which means that good will triumph, everyone will live and MacMurray will get Joan Bennett.
So since there are no good jokes -- Zasu Pitts is aboard the plane and I usually love her, but she's so annoying and whiny and futile that I was hoping she'd get shot -- I didn't care.
We've seen the heroic people stranded in a plane a hundred times.
John Farrow liked to make that movie a lot.
We've seen Hollywood Danger and it's real, where people actually die -- think ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.
There the stakes are high and real.
But this is only Hollywood Danger, so I didn't really care..
13 Hours!
I could get to and back to New York from San Francisco, and be in uptown Manhattan in 12!.
O.K., so that is 2016 flying time, but it's neat to see how they used to do it.
A kid with a jack knife, a mobster with a gun.
No TSA in sight.
Snowstorms, frantic nannies and wisecracking stewardesses.
"Mayday!
Mayday!", pilot Fred McMurray declares, and of course, I interject, "Why, that's the Russian new year!" A series of serious airplane disaster films and a hysterical spoof that is now a classic have added parody to the serious scripts of any film set on an airplane, and this is one of the earliest.Seeing beautiful blonde Joan Bennett getting ready to boars a plane he'll be flying later on, MacMurray vets stewardess Ruth Donnelly he'll get Bennett to accept a date with, but it won't be easy.
Also in board is bratty Benny Bartlett who causes havoc with his mischievous ways, his worried nanny Zasu Pitts, and gangster Fred Keating whom Bennett is desperately trying to prevent his having a meeting with her sister.
The mixture of comedy and melodrama keeps this moving at the most furious of paces, an early example of why disaster films continued to be so popular for decades afterwards.With air travel so completely different 80 years later, this classic (directed by rising director Mitchell Leissen) shows a simpler but rougher time.
The mixture of different types if characters and a wonderfully witty script is like a perfect blend of peanut butter and jelly.
At one point, Pitts claims to be scared out of her skin, and pilot MacMurray promises to make her a rug if she does.
Veteran "it" girl wanna-be Marie Prevost had one of her last film roles in a rather large bit as an airport waitress.
The conclusion was most likely nail biting in 1936, and remains gripping today as well.