I guess the main reason most people will watch "Wings of Danger" (1952) is to catch Diane Cilento in her feature film debut. As she is given the very last spot on the cast list, I was afraid at first that her role would be small and insignificant. But actually, although she makes a late entrance, her role is of some importance – and she not only makes a good fist of it, but looks radiantly lovely to boot. In fact, she steals the movie's feminine honors from the movie's nominal star, Naomi Chance, and runs the female villain, Kay Kendall, close to the winning line as well. As for the actual first-billed star, Zachary Scott, making a rare appearance in a British film, he's okay, but his role is not what you would call colorful, and even his personal charisma is easily undermined by Robert Beatty. By Hammer's somewhat mediocre standards, production values are not bad at all. And director Terence Fisher even puts the action scenes across with a fair amount of excitement. You can find this movie coupled with "Terror Street" on an excellent VCI DVD.

Zachary Scott stars with Robert Beatty and Kay Kendall in a 1952 British quota film, "Dead on Course." During the '50s, many American actors went to Britain and made these films: Cesar Romero, Dane Clark, Dennis O'Keefe, and others. Some are better than others, but mostly, like this one, are fairly routine.Scott plays Richard Van Ness, part of an airline service. His girlfriend's brother, Nick (Beatty) insists on flying in bad weather in order to deliver unimportant cargo. Van Ness tries to ground him, but Nick threatens to tell their boss that Van Ness has intermittent blackouts, which will ground him.Nick's plane crashes near the Channel Islands under odd circumstances. The police ask Van Ness for help, telling him of a smuggling operation that they've connected with the airline. Van Ness pays a visit to his boss' girlfriend (Kay Kendall) and acts interested in order to find out what he can.One of the plot points seemed obvious from the beginning; it was just a feeling I had but somehow, it was telegraphed in the script.The acting is so-so, with Robert Beatty quite charming and Kay Kendall a good femme fatale. Kendall was a rising star who married Rex Harrison after they did a play together in 1955; when he realized she was dying of leukemia, Harrison divorced his current wife, Lili Palmer, and married Kendall. Kendall did not realize she was terminally ill. Their story was the basic plot for a Terence Rattigan play, "In Praise of Love," which Harrison did on Broadway with Julie Harris.Zachary Scott said all of his lines in a very aggressive manner, absolutely no shading. I always liked him -- he was good as a sleaze, a weak man, a Henry Fonda-ish role in The Southerner - here he just seems hostile all the way through.Just okay.

You know there's a problem when half way through a movie that only lasts an hour and thirteen minutes it seems as if two hours have dragged by. Wings of Danger is another of those Brit noirs where a fading Hollywood name was cast in the lead in hopes of getting some play for the film in America. In this case, the problem with the film is the screenplay; there appears to be no motivation for Richard Van Ness' actions. It doesn't help that Zachary Scott as Van Ness is not too believable when he acts as a tough guy. Van Ness is a pilot working for Boyd Spencer Airlines, a freight-hauling outfit. Nick Talbot (Robert Beatty), a fellow pilot and friend he doesn't seem too friendly with, disappears in a storm over the ocean. Hints of corruption, smuggling, blackmailing and counterfeiting start to show up. But why should we care about any of this? Richard suffers from blackouts and knows at any time he could wind up in the drink or in pieces on the ground. Why does he keep flying? Not only don't we know, the black-out question never turns into a serious plot issue. It just disappears after a big thing is made of it at the start. Why doesn't Richard help the police when they first come to him? There's no reason except to give the screenwriters the chance to show that Richard doesn't take guff from anyone. Why does Richard decide to investigate for himself without telling the police? Who knows?. Since there's no believable motivation, we know we're watching a movie contrived on the assumption that the viewers will be too dull to notice. A major problem is Zachary Scott. Tough guys to be believable need to seem as comfortable doing violence with their fists as well as with their words. Scott's trademark as an actor, however, wasn't his physical presence. Scott's distinctiveness was his way of delivering lines that came across as either suave and sleazy (in his best roles, such as The Mask of Dimitrios and Mildred Pierce) or off-handedly condescending (in most of his other films). In nearly every role he had, he was a hard man to warm up to. If you can picture this in Scott's delivery, you'll have an idea of how the picture doesn't work, both in Scott's believability and in the screen writing: "Nick had taken a sock at the gale and it had socked him back and broken his neck. It was as simple as that. And yet there was a lot of loose ends and ideas that jabbed at my brain and fizzled out to the edge of nowhere..."

When charismatic Nick Talbot (second billed Robert Beatty) disappears after flying into a storm after his partner Richard Van Ness (gravel-voiced Zachary Scott) has ordered the plane to be grounded, it seems not unlikely that (a) he's up to no good and (b) that we'll see him again before the movie's over. Made on a shoestring at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith but supposedly mainly set in Guernsey, this is quite a clever thriller with lively dialogue, though Richard's liability to black out when flying is too irrelevant. For nostalgic film buffs it's good to see naughty lady Kay Kendall a year before her breakthrough performance in 'Genevieve', Diane Cilento (at one time Mrs Sean Connery) as Nick's fiancée and camp Harold Lang as a blackmailer, but Naomi Chance is a boring heroine. I'd lost track of the malarkey before the end, but the finale has action and excitement.