Non-Stop New York (1937) means it. Careening in under the 70-minute wire, it's as madcap a quota quickie as ever shot its heroine through a proto-noir's worth of miscarried justice into the aerodynamic future, stowed pluckily away on the transatlantically palatial
Lisbon Clipper in hopes of beating the execution of the innocent tramp in the frame for the gangland slaying she witnessed one underemployed New Year's Eve as the ball dropped in Times Square for 1939. The plot bounces like a business traveler between New York and London. Its character turns suggest a centrifuge. If anyone talked at less than double time, it'd have the whole bill to itself.
No shade to a rogue's gallery of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, the science fiction right on the curve of civil aviation is the scene-stealer in this flick. In the fall of 1937, there were no direct flights from London to New York. The age of airships over the Atlantic had ended that spring with the
Hindenburg and the proven range of flying boats just barely established itself that summer between Foynes and Botwood. By the film's target date of 1939, however, there was nothing fantastical about the transatlantic passenger and mail service provided by Pan American's Boeing 314 Clippers and if the Short S.26 had not been commandeered by the RAF straight out of No. 3 Shop, it would have flown the same northern route for Imperial Airways. Without foreknowledge of the fire curtain of history,
Non-Stop New York joined the industry in presuming a comparably luxe experience aboard the Southampton-docked "airmail" of Atlantic Airways: "London to New York, 18 hours, fare £65!" Even for Gaumont-British whose sideline in sci-fi was consistently nuts-and-bolts-ier than the cosmic proclamations of
Things to Come (1936), it's an impressive extrapolation. The flight time would have to wait for the Douglas DC-4, but the pricing is about right for a Pan Am Clipper. Executed in a combination of gorgeously streamlined sets and six-engined models, the
Lisbon Clipper has staterooms and promenade decks more befitting an ocean liner than even the swankiest of flying boats, but then again the 314s would boast the stewards and silver service of a first-class voyage and their interiors had been Deco-designed by no less a futurist than Norman Bel Geddes. The globally commuting future to which the interwar years looked forward was spacious and sleek and if the technological slingshot of World War II would render designs like the Dornier Do X or the Latécoère 521 as alien to the jet-accustomed eye as dirigibles, they were nonetheless, for a brief, achievable window, not at all dead-end real. The picture was praised at the time for its pinpoint zeitgeist. Even when it cranks up the action to the day-saving wing-walking of a disaster film, it remembers the vertical dimension of skyjacking and anticipates the reality of mid-air murder to the year. Frankly, its biggest stretch of the imagination may be its handling of a parachute, although it does know that no commercial airline ever issued them to its passengers like life jackets. I hope Hugo Gernsback saw it and plotzed. "And we've got seventeen and fourpence between us!"
Since none of this eccentric prescience would get anywhere as a story without a human cast to animate its light thrills, however, it's just as well that they are an ensemble delight beginning with Anna Lee as the pertly dashing chorine with an intransigent sense of justice and no fear of the police even after an unwarranted prison term; her repartee can give the
Clipper a run for its cruising speed. "I suppose if a man had asked you back to supper, you'd have taken your little notebook and written everything down." John Loder as the romantically inclined inspector on the case isn't quite in her league even when he loosens up enough to be seen putting out his tongue at his own reflection, but fortunately she has a great, game charlady of a mother in Drusilla Wills and an accidental sleuthing partner in Desmond Tester, the nerdishly bespectacled and opera-caped prodigy who would so much rather be practicing the saxophone than the violin. "You give me your ticket and I'll swap it for two London to Leeds and a second-class to Vienna." Francis L. Sullivan as the architect of all their misfortunes may be unusually hands-on for an intercontinental crime boss, but he's justified by the bored delicacy with which he performs his signature trick of snapping a match to light and his Paraguayan impersonation which throws down the gauntlet to Mr. Paravicini while Frank Cellier capitalizes on bald-faced sleaze as the bookmaker whose taste for blackmail has taken him rashly aloft. "Cash down, you can do as you like. No cash, I'll be a father to the girl." Blink, but do not miss the Wodehousian aunt played by Athene Seyler, the seen-it-all steward by Jerry Verno, the moonlighting informer by Peter Bull, the kindhearted mouthpiece by James Pirrie, and the railroaded down-and-out by Arthur Goullet, all of whom take on their screen time with small-parts gusto. New York plays itself in newsreel shots, even if the representation of its woodnotes wild implies that lots of cities have an East End. The rest of North America is not forgotten when the action passes climactically over Newfoundland.
Whatever the resemblance of the divers-handed screenplay to its credited source of Ken Attiwill's
Sky Steward (1936), as directed by Robert Stevenson
Non-Stop New York is fast, fun, and photographed by Mutz Greenbaum, so even its earthbound scenes have an expressionist luster—the urban heartbeat of a neon sign, an uncomfortable memory in a half-scrubbed theater floor—and as soon as the suspense tightens aerially, Hitchcock missed several tricks never employing him. The art direction by Walter Murton is supposed to have consulted with Shorts and other aircraft designers on the realism of its lavish seaplane, which if true spectacularly paid off. I love the heyday of flying boats in part because it was a genuine wave of a future that on the other side of an air war had washed another way and this movie lifts off from it giddily. It may have looked one step ahead of the headlines to its first-run audiences, but it had actually wrapped production months before the
Pan American Clipper III and
Caledonia flew their great circle both ways over the Atlantic, while the
Hindenburg was still flying lighter-than-air. I am not sure it should even count as hauntology, since the future it envisioned did essentially come to pass. I had never heard of it before this week. It looked no worse than a little flickery on
TCM and therefore it bugs me that every copy I have found so far plentifully available in the public domain looks
blown out or
beat up or
both. It doesn't have to be a lost classic to deserve a little polish and the appreciation due its deployment of Chekhov's saxophone mute. Lee sparkles whether she's keeping a weather eye on the propellers or putting a point-blank bullet point through her love interest: "And in the fifth and last place, you may be darned good in the moonlight, but as a policeman you're just awful." Give her that job at Scotland Yard already! This ticket brought to you by my airy backers at
Patreon.
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