I'm Totally "Over" This!

In my prior post, all about disaster movies prior to the 1970s trend for them, I noted a little-known flick called Jet Over the Atlantic (1959), which I'd never actually seen before. Curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check it out. I learned long ago never to expect documentary-level realism in vintage films about air travel, but even that sort of forewarning couldn't have prepared me for the lunacy that is this movie...! It's hysterically silly and implausible, but nevertheless enthralling throughout. I just had to write about it in a more in-depth way. So get ready for my take-off on this soaring adventure!

The movie has barely begun when controversy ensues. It's called JET Over the Atlantic. So why is it a propeller plane? Well, it seems there were prop-jet planes which used old-school propellers powered by jet engines located behind them.

Our story begins in Spain where FBI agent George Raft is informing the airline that he intends to board a flight at midnight that evening with a prisoner in tow. The escaped prisoner (who he has not apprehended at this point!) is to be extradited to the U.S. in order to continue serving his sentence for a double murder. Raft wants to be on hand to view all the other passengers as they board.

Raft is next seen on a stakeout, watching a couple's silhouette through a window.

Said couple turns out to be Guy Madison and his girlfriend Virginia Mayo, fresh from an evening of lovey-dovey.

The two plan to be married. He decides to head out an obtain a marriage license while she must dart to her job, for which she's already running late.

What is her job? Why, she's the headliner at a local nightclub!

Somehow, 40 year-old American Mayo enthralls a packed house of Spanish patrons each night by twirling around in the middle of the dance floor while flailing a satin cape to and fro... surely this matador-inspired "act" was not entirely foreign to the patrons? But of course she's a smash... 

Madison, who's swung by to let her know that he has the marriage license, sure does seem to like her in her faux bullfighter getup.

Not far away, ever-creepy George Macready is making a secret transaction with a shady type. He's obtained a new compound for use in a way God only knows.

Back at his hotel, Madison is dejected to find he's been spotted and captured by Raft and a couple of other men. Turns out that he is the escaped convict!

He convinces Raft to let him place one last call to his gal Mayo, informing her that their impending marriage is off, for reasons he won't explain.

Now back at his home, we see Macready mourning the loss of his young daughter... and packing a suitcase with the mystery compound and a detonator!

His nervous wife Anna Lee comes in and tries to talk him out of taking her back to the U.S. with him, citing that she'd rather stay in Spain where their daughter is buried. He won't be swayed, though.

As the midnight takeoff approaches, we meet some of the passengers who will be aboard the flight. Imperious opera singer Ilona Massey is joined by her put-upon assistant Mary Anderson.

Mayo has fled the nightclub still in her costume - covered only by a coat - to check the airport for signs that Madison is leaving. She is bewildered to see him readying to take the flight in question with a strange man (Raft.) She hastily buys a ticket herself and hurries onto the plane.

Off goes the jet... over the Atlantic, bound for New York City!

Instead of chicken or fish, the pilot is given a corn dog for dinner. Ha! No, I'm kidding. This is the facial vibrator in-flight microphone that he uses to make announcements to the travelers.

When it's announced that seat belts may be removed, Raft and Madison have to cooperate with one another to do so, thanks to the handcuffs that join them. Note the startled woman behind Raft.

You could travel the world for years and be unlikely to find a nosy busybody as dedicated as this gal. Played by Argentina Brunetti, she can't wait to alert her seatmate Venetia Stevenson to the situation at hand. 

She hardly stops there, though. Soon she's spreading the word to the handsome young doctor, Brett Halsey, in the seat behind her. She told two friends and they told two friends and so on and so on...!

When it's Lee's turn to discuss the convict on board and how he may be headed to the electric chair, a confident Macready is doubtful.

That's because his suitcase beneath them has begun to do its job and is starting to smoke! (Since the "No Smoking" sign is off, I guess it's all right!)

Mayo decides to make her presence known to a surprised Madison and can't avoid noticing that her soon-to-be ball & chain is now handcuffed to an older man!

Madison is allowed to follow her back to the airplane's lounge where Madison attempts to explain his position to his mystified fiancee.

He reveals that just after he'd been released from the service (as a combat flyer), he was in a small bar and witnessed an extortion racket in progress. When it turned sour, he woke up with a gun in his hand with two corpses nearby! He's innocent of the charges, but was convicted anyway.

It's here that we enjoy a snippet (principally a bunch of oohing and aahing) of the movie's theme song, sung by our beloved favorites, The King Sisters, who received prominent billing in the credits. The song is such a ripoff of Dimitri Tiomkin's Oscar-winning music from The High and the Mighty (1954) that many viewers have mistakenly thought they were hearing the earlier theme in this film! A recording of the full song can be heard here with all the oohs and aahs kicking in at the 0:52 mark.

Snoop sister Brunetti shamelessly heads back to the lounge and listens intently to the whole story! Mayo briefly opens her coat to Madison to reveal that she's scarcely got anything much under it!

Meanwhile, a teary Stevenson has caught the attention of Halsey in the seat behind her. She relays the fact that she's on her way to see him for the first time in many years after her mother divorced him and took her away. Remind me to take some letters onto my next flight and begin tearing up where a handsome doctor might notice and ask if he can help!

Massey has her own private stateroom (this jet's interior is like the friggin' Waldorf Astoria or something!) Never satisfied, she suggests to Anderson that they go out and find a seat in order with mix with the masses a bit.

Intercepting champagne that was intended for someone else, she settles in and begin yammering on. All the while her knowing, slightly subversive assistand barely tolerates her.

When Massey stands up and bellows to the steward, a little girl points at her and LOUDLY exclaims, "Mommy, is that the wicked witch?"

Mom is played by one-time Warner Brothers ingenue Margaret Lindsay, whose movie career seemed to be on the same downward flight path of this plane! Unreported is whatever this little girl thought of the upturned serving bowl on the lady's head behind her...

Brunetti can't help herself and asks Raft if it would be all right to stage an in-flight wedding (I'm not making this up!) between Mayo and Madison.

After agreeing to let Mayo use her stateroom as a place to prepare, opera diva Massey prods Brunetti to have her sing at the service, but the old woman turns her down flat.

So she won't have to walk down the (plane's?) aisle in a Vegas showgirl costume, Anderson lends Mayo one of her dresses, which she seems quite pleased with.

Smoke is beginning to creep into the plane's ventilation system. Depending on one's sense of the perverse, these controls either resemble eyes or nipples!

As a result, the pilot starts to feel fatigued and decides to go lie down in a nearby bunk while the co-pilot takes over.

In the lounge, a priest who's on board (of course!) performs a protracted and rather gooey matrimonial ceremony to the condemned man and the nightclub hoofer.

To Lee's distress, Macready can't keep himself from fixating on the little girl across the way.

While Lindsay sucks down another Pall Mall, the girl is pretending to feed her pinata some type of treat.

Nearby, Massey is bemoaning to a beleagured Anderson the horror of having had to give up her stateroom to the newlyweds (so that they presumably could "consummate" their marriage, though we all know they were doing it long before now!)

And, sure enough, Mayo has been freed from her borrowed frock and is joining the mile-high club with humpy Madison.

Their lovemaking dehydrates her and she asks him to fetch her some water. While he's in the aisle, he spots a sleeping man with a gun in his holster. Madison slips it out and absconds with it!

Back in the "honeymoon suite," he confesses to Mayo that he plans to force the plane to avoid New York and head to Canada instead, where he can go on the run and avoid being imprisoned again.

People above are feeling a little warm. No wonder! There's a inferno burning just below them!!

While overheated passengers are peeling their blankets off on the red-eye flight, Macready puts his hand down onto the carpet below to see if his big plan is on schedule.

Pleased with himself, he becomes quite complacent while Lee, who doesn't know what's happening, gets more and more feverishly concerned.

The fire is at last discovered, and the sprinkler system is sort of thinking about putting it out, but the passengers start worrying. 

One numbskull thinks it wise to take the butt of his gun (everyone on the plane seemed to be carrying!) and knock out a window, but Madison stops him before he can. Raft quickly arrives, however, to take the gun from Madison. (He still has the other one, though!)

In a movie already bursting with lunacy, Macready gets up out of his seat and approaches Lindsay. He wonders if he might hold her daughter for a while (!) and help to calm her.

Lindsay finds it quite acceptable and flattering and hastily hands over her kid to Macready who, on his best day, looked like a menacing threat to society!

The fire may have been extinguished, but now it's on to round two! Macready's suitcase has an endlessly-foaming toxic substance oozing out of it. Now the fumes are eagerly heading up to the passenger areas.

The co-pilot discovers that the navigator has gone and died! Before long, he collapses himself.

The deranged Macready, who seems to be everywhere like a slinky Snidely Whiplash, slithers into the cockpit and begins fiddling with some of the plane's equipment.

Though they'd all been warned that excessive emotional outbursts might raise blood pressure and cause the poison to make it to their heart quicker, some of the passengers can't resist a little good old fashioned hysteria.

"Ha, ha, HAH! Now THAT'S a good one!" Some of the extras' expressions resemble raucous laughter rather than the terror and panic that's called for. Or maybe those two extremes are closer together in appearance than we might think.

Madison makes his way to the cockpit and soon discovers that he isn't going to have to hijack the plane. He's the only one who can fly it!

While the craft is on autopilot, he and Raft head to the cargo hold to see what in the world is going on down there. Macready, again appearing anywhere at any time, descends to confront them.

Now, as if there isn't enough trouble, a gunfight breaks out.

Freed from burning to a crisp, the passengers now have to struggle to survive the toxic gasses from the cargo hold!

Pivotal moments between some of the passengers are shared. (I straight up though that Anderson was going to come out to Massey in her confessional.)

Madison is tasked with having to decide whether to land the plane NOW, even though he's due to be apprehended on the ground, or risk everyone's lives by going on further into Canada. There's still more to the tale after this, but I won't give away the ending. If you want to see this epic, it's available for viewing here!

"I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you."

"Surely there must be something you can do." "I'm doing everything I can... and stop calling me Shirley!"

Madison turned a tiny role in 1944's Since You Went Away into a considerable movie career. Easy on the eyes, there have been a couple of photo tributes to him on this site. After starring in quite a few westerns and working on a variety of other movies, he turned to TV in the very successful series Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok. This was the last movie he did in the U.S. prior to moving to Italy and making a mark in the Italian film industry. He found great success there, but in time came back to America for an occasional role in a movie or on TV. Retiring in 1988, he passed away of emphysema in 1996 at age 74.

 

Mayo began popping up in feature films in the mid-1940s and by 1946 was cast in the prestigious The Best Years of Our Lives. Bigger and more showy roles followed such as with Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and A Song is Born (1948.) She was paired with James Cagney in the well-known 1949 gangster drama White Heat. She was also handy as the curvy heroine in adventure flicks like The Flame and the Arrow (1950) or Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951.) She continued in movies, resisting TV until 1957, but in time began working in less important fare. She worked in increasingly infrequent projects up through 1997 and was taken by pnuemonia and heart failure in 2005 at age 84.

 

Raft is someone who's popularity really surprises me. I've never been able to latch on to any significant appeal where he's concerned. (And by now his acting was at a sort of Jack Webb from Dragnet level.) He was often a hit with various Tinseltown ladies, however, from Mae West and Carole Lombard to Betty Grable and Norma Shearer! At one time a very popular star in various crime and action dramas, he was notoriously finicky about the roles he accepted, often turning down parts that allowed others to gain fame. (Among many, there were High Sierra, 1941, The Maltese Falcon, 1941, and Double Indemnity, 1941.) Many of his own hit films are not particularly well-remembered today despite his own box office notoriety. By about 1950, he began a career decline which was partly reinvigorated by a supporting turn in Some Like It Hot (1959), this movie coming soon after. Though he suffered from ill health in his later years (resorting to oxygen at times between takes during Jet), he occasionally popped up in a small role before passing away from emphysema in 1980 at age 79. 

Hungarian-born Massey really was a singer of light opera near the start of her career and costarred alongside Nelson Eddy in Rosalie (1937) and Balalaika (1939), but her promotion as "The New Dietrich" was not to be. You weren't going to find Marlene Dietrich in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as one could Massey! The public did not accept her as a replacement for Eddy's frequent costar Jeannette MacDonald. In time, she found regular work on TV, even landing her own brief variety series, The Ilona Massey Show in 1954-55. Jet was her final credited role and, though occasionally amusing, she overacted it tremendously. Humbled in real life by a staggeringly poor childhood (she claimed to have never tasted meat before the age of seven), she was nonetheless adept at playing haughty on screen. Massey was felled by cancer in 1974 at age 64.

Macready, regardless of a career filled with severe and petrifying roles, was in real life a cultured man of taste and refinement. A Shakespearean stage actor, he'd been left with a scarred right cheek following a car accident during college (and was stitched up by veterinarian!) After a very successful Broadway start, he segued into films and a gallery of often-threatening parts, Gilda (1946) being a notable example. Paths of Glory (1957) presented him with another great opportunity to play harmfully strict. Married once, from 1931-1943, and with three children, he and stage pal Vincent Price opened a popular art gallery/hangout called The Little Gallery, which was a fun spot until a serious rent increase caused it to close. Macready worked on Peyton Place and appeared in The Great Race (1965) among many other things before emphysema wore him down. He died in 1973 at age 73.

The ordinarily more cheerful Anna Lee began working in films in the early-1930s in British films and continued acting up until 2003! Having wed a director, Robert Stevenson, the two collaborated on several movies together (including King Solomon's Mines, 1937) and ultimately emigrated to the U.S. Soon after, she worked for John Ford in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Fritz Lang in Hangmen Also Die! (1943.) Her second husband was a pilot who was taking her on war bond drives across the nation. Later projects include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), The Sound of Music (1965) and a long-running role on General Hospital. Much of her time on Hospital as social matriarch Lila Quartermaine was spent in a wheelchair as she'd been in a serious car accident in 1981 that left her partly paralyzed. After a controversial pink slip from the show by a new producer, she died in 2004, officially of pneumonia, but also from a broken heart, at 91.

Lindsay had been a popular supporting actress from the early 1930s, with films such as Cavalcade (1933), Baby Face (1933), Green Light (1937) and Jezebel (1938) among her credits. In the 1940s, she was a regular in a series of Columbia Pictures Ellery Queen movies and appeared in Scarlet Street (1945) as well. Having moved into television during the 1950s, she popped up in such 1960s movies as Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960) and Tammy and the Doctor (1963.) Lindsay was lesbian in real life and never married, most often residing with one of her sisters. Retiring in 1974, she died of (like many here!) emphysema in 1980 at age 74.

 

This could only have happened in Hollywood. Stevenson was in real life the daughter of the aforementioned Lee! After her parents' divorce, she lived with her father while her sister lived with Lee. Thus Stevenson and her mom were virtually estranged for 15 years until they were cast together (albeit sharing no scenes) in this movie! This is basically the inverse of the part Stevenson was playing - going to visit an estranged father. Stevenson had made a huge splash in fan magazines due to her photogenic looks and many dates with closeted actors like Tony Perkins (and she was briefly the wife of Russ Tamblyn.) Her acting career was short-lived and she departed from it just before marrying Don Everly of The Everly Brothers. One of their daughters was married for a short while to Axl Rose from Guns N' Roses! Friends with Burt Reynolds from an early TV appearance, she eventually worked for his production company. Parkinson's disease claimed her in 2022 at age 84.

 

Miss Anderson was one of those performers who really didn't mean a thing to me until one day I watched her work on Peyton Place and suddenly I adored her! Possessed of very unusual speaking voice, she could roll words around in her mouth and give them quite a spin. A member of the cast of Gone with the Wind (1939) and active through the mid-1960s, you can see and learn much more about her right here!

 

I remain convinced that if Halsey had ever learned to look up instead of nearly always down, he'd have enjoyed double the career success that he had. His heavy brow line had a tendency to cover up those baby blues if he wasn't careful. You may see and read much more about Halsey right here!

 

Finally, we come to Brunetti, a completely unfamiliar performer to me. Her role is hysterically ridiculous in Jet, but it's only one of many countless portrayals that she had over the course of a lengthy career. The daughter of a famed Sicilian stage actress (Mimi Aguglia, who was herself - quite literally - born on a stage while her own mother was in Othello!!), Brunetti came into the world while her parents were in, yes - Argentina, hence her unusual name.  Hired by MGM as a young lady to dub their movies into Italian, she soon enough began appearing out in front of the lens. (She's apparently in Macready's Gilda somewhere.) It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Broken Arrow (1950) and The Far Horizons (1955) are just a few of the many movies she popped up in. She was also an incredibly busy TV actress in the 1950s and '60s. But what I found fascinating is that in 1961, two years after Jet, she was playing the mother of Raft in The George Raft Story! Ray Danton (!) played Raft in a movie that the subject did not like one bit. A useful character actress, she worked on General Hospital and popular shows such as Fantasy Island, Who's the Boss? and even Everybody Loves Raymond. She passed away in 2005 of natural causes at age 98. 

"You mean that's IT??"

Oh, okay, just one more thing....

That's it until our next dive!