Into the Soup

Fate Is the Hunter. Consolidated Airlines' Flight 22 lifts off the runway on a routine hop to Seattle. Pilot Rod Taylor takes a cup of coffee from Stewardess Suzanne Pleshette, trades a quip or two. Suddenly a bell clangs in the cockpit, a light blinks a warning on the control panel. "Engine blew," snaps Taylor. In two-engine-aircraft dramas, troubles never come singly. The tower reports three other planes blocking the path back to the strip. The radio goes dead. And of course Engine No. 2 conks out. Flight 22 crash-lands on a deserted beach, bellies safely down and plows through the sand--only to hit an abandoned pier and incinerate.

If such melodrama does little to promote air travel, it does even less for

Ernest K. Gann's best-selling memoirs of his years as a pioneer commercial pilot. After a vivid, horrific opening, Hunter flies straight into the soup of formula Hollywood fiction. To absolve buddy Taylor, Airline Executive Glenn Ford undertakes an investigation of his own. Needless to say, Flyboy Taylor turns out to have been gay, dashing and brave, a model pilot who survived such hazards as a wartime encounter with Jane Russell and an irreproachable idyl with a Eurasian ichthyologist (Nancy Kwan).

Next to fish, Kwan thinks mostly about the inexorability of Fate. In the movie's least credible scene, Ford solemnly reports Nancy's verdict to a panel of CAB experts: the crash victims died because "for some reason or other, their time had come." Luckily, even in Hollywood the CAB shows little inclination to ponder the inscrutable. So Ford plods ahead to prove that Kismet was probably just a little short circuit. Hunter seems an unlikely choice for inflight screenings. Passengers on the ground may view it at their own risk.

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