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Don't look round, but I think we're taking off
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.
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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In 1962 my aunt-to-be (my mother's brother's fiancee) flew from London to Washington, I think, or maybe London to NY and then took a train the rest of the way to North Carolina to meet my grandparents. It was a 17 hour propeller flight at the time.
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"We came as quick as we could, but we had to come down near Whitehaven with engine trouble, and if we had come down half a mile sooner I shouldn't be here now."
It's just so neat to me that by doing nothing more than keeping up with the latest in aviation, Non-Stop New York managed to hit the mark of a scheduled transatlantic future even before it was world-historically true that airships were over and flying boats were in. Everyone wanted reliable air service from New York to London; it was talked about constantly. Until I dug for its production dates—it had a September release—I assumed the film was at least partly a product of the excitement over the successful Atlantic crossings of July 1937. It finished shooting in April. So much science fiction aims for that kind of predictivity and misses by miles.
In 1962 my aunt-to-be (my mother's brother's fiancee) flew from London to Washington, I think, or maybe London to NY and then took a train the rest of the way to North Carolina to meet my grandparents. It was a 17 hour propeller flight at the time.
The 18-hour estimate wasn't bad! It's shorter than the first passenger flight of the Yankee Clipper and longer than the proving flights between Botwood and Foynes.
My mother flew in and out of New York in 1968, a 14-hour flight with a layover to refuel in Iceland. She really hoped the weather would sock them in and she could wander the city, but alas, they flew right on.
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Same! She turns out to have done a whole bunch of genre stuff in her early, British career, including The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935) with Conrad Veidt as a supernatural stranger, The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) with Boris Karloff as a mad scientist, and King Solomon's Mines (1937) with Paul Robeson as the rightful heir. I expect to try to see all of them. I had no idea Bedlam had reunited her with Karloff.
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There's a shockingly not awful copy on YouTube! Also the Internet Archive. Several of the same cast and crew. Anna Lee and Robert Stevenson were an item at the time.
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I kept meaning to remark on your new icon, by the way. Where in Your Monster is it from?
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Nice.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.P.1
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I gave my brother that film a few years ago! I believe he liked it, which is what I hoped from anything with Peter Lorre or Conrad Veidt. Gaumont handled the British distribution of the English-language version, speaking of.
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Yes! I love that there's a triptych.
I would not necessarily recommend it on grounds of quality rather than interest, but High Treason (1929) aimed ambitiously for the mid-century and was wrong about everything except the Chunnel and Zoom.
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The sound version played the 'Thon in 2016, before which time I had not heard of it, either. I never have gotten around to the silent version to see whether it plays better without the paradigm shift.
You should check out the amusing NY Times review available through IMDB.
"If a surgical operation be necessary to get a joke into the head of a Scotsman, all the aurists in Harley Street will be required to work day and night upon the ears of the Englishman to make them thoroughly receptive of such extravagancies as some patriotically-minded London critics have recently indulged in."
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Come to the 'Thon! I was born in Boston and never encountered it until
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Worth taping if it comes to a channel near you!
(I'm pretty sure I've seen Anna Lee in something, but not sure what without going to look).
(She started at Gainsborough and Ealing. Chances are good.)
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I had a feeling after I wrote that, that it was Return to Yesterday, and it was! I also saw her in The Four Just Men, but less so, and also that one wound up all rather disappointing anyway, whereas I've watched RtY 2 or 3 times now.
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With Clive Brook in seaside rep! You have recommended that one to me. I shall nudge it up the nonexistent list.
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Thank you so much! For real-life equivalents, here's the Yankee Clipper taking off from Baltimore in 1939 and landing (a different flight) at Southampton and here, discovered in the process, is the Dornier Do X in 1930. Actually, here is just a very well-illustrated article about flying boats.