Flight to Hong Kong
Director: Joseph Newman
Year: 1956
Rating: 5.5
This is an interesting film from second feature
director Jospeh Newman (This Island Earth) for a couple reasons. The settings
of Hong Kong and Macau and the fact that there is no good guy. There is a
main protagonist but he is mainly a slick operator who gets over his head
and makes a lot of bad decisions. It is also the feature film debut of Werner
Klemperer best known as Col. Klink. Because of his accent and background,
he often had to play Nazis but in fact his Jewish family fled Germany in
the 1930s. When he agreed to play Klink, it was only under the condition
that Klink was always the foil of the comedy. He isn't the main character
- he plays the head of a crime syndicate. The main character is played by
Rory Calhoun, an actor likely forgotten by most but back in the 1950s he
was one of the premier tough guys in B Westerns and was The Texan in a TV
series of 79 episodes. It has been years since I had seen him in anything.
Tony (Calhoun) is on a flight to Hong Kong
and in the seat next to him is Pamela (Barbara Rush), a famous author with
a bunch of best-sellers. He tells her he is in the export-import business.
Sort of. The plane is carrying a shipment of diamonds and three men with
guns - the pre-security days - hijack the plane, land it at a small isolated
airport, snatch the diamonds and flee on a motorboat. A well-planned crime.
You might expect that Tony will somehow break it up but as we soon learn
he was part of it. He is a member of a criminal global syndicate and is the
guy with a talent for finding buyers and deliverers. One of the best parts
of the film is him simply sitting at his desk calling people from all over
the world to distribute the diamonds.
He lives in Macao with a beautiful girlfriend
(Dolores Donlon). He owns the town. Everyone knows Tony. Brought up there
as an abandoned child, he was taken in by Mama Lin who runs a fantan gambling
house. She is played by Soo Yong who also appeared in Flower Drum Song, Sayonara,
Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Target Hong Kong and The Good Earth.
Pamela keeps showing up in Macao from Hong Kong and there is a spark. The
film treats Macao as being just up the street from Hong Kong and though it
only takes about 50-minutes now on the JetTurbo, back then it took about
3 hours on the ferry. Life is good for Tony. Till it all goes bad. He never
wanted to be part of the Syndicate and when the opportunity comes, he steals
a parcel of diamonds, fakes his death and goes on the run. Nothing goes as
planned though. The Syndicate doesn't believe he is dead and never stops
looking for him. Even if it takes years says the Klemperer character.
There is some location shooting in Macau
and Hong Kong. For a while it looked to be mainly stock footage and blue
screen, but then the actors are actually out on the streets of the two towns
- mainly around the sampans of course which showed up in every film shot
in Hong Kong by foreigners in those days. It feels like they could have made
better use of the locations since they were there but they were on a budget,
so it is mainly interior sets.
