Come Fly With Me

Yet another movie that's been on my DVR for a little while that's showing up on TCM again is Come Fly With Me. The next showing is tomorrow, June 30, at 11:45 AM.

The movie opens with a view from a car driving in to what is today Kennedy Airport in New York, but since this was made before everybody went gaga over naming stuff over the dead overrated president, it was still New York International Airport. Polar Atlantic is one of those airlines that flies the international routes at a time when flying was still seen as glamorous and romantic. The current flight to Paris has three stewardesses: Donna Stuart (Dolores Hart, in her final film), Hilda "Bergie" Bergstrom (Lois Nettleton), and in her first flight as a professional, Carol Brewster (Pamela Tiffin).

Brewster being a rookie, she has a tendency to make mistakes, such as barely showing up on time, and then falling for a practical joke from the flight engineer. When the first officer, Ray Winsley (Hugh O'Brian), tells her what happened and helps her return the favor, she immediately falls for him. She obviously doens't have the life experience that longer-term stewardesses have.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the flight, Bergie is dealing with a drunk in tourist class. Standing up for her is another passenger, Walter (Karl Malden), and he's nice enough that Bergie is willing to spend some time with him in Paris before the next flight, especially once she learns how Walter is a widower. Donna sees an Austrian baron, von Elzingen (Karlheinz Böhm) and, thinking he's rich, actually starts pursuing him.

Love doesn't work out quite the way that any of them might think. Carol doesn't realize that Ray has the typical "girl in every port", or at least in Paris. However, that girl in Paris is married to another man, and that other man is ticked off enough to complain to Polar Atlantic's corporate office, which at one point gets Ray demoted to doing cargo flights. Donna and Carol play a mean trick on Bergie, sending her to a place way above her and Walter's financial class for dinner. And as for von Elzingen, he's no longer rich at all, as his old palace has been turned into a museum. He's also working less than legitimately, smuggling diamonds into Europe. Worse, he concocts a scheme to have Donna be an unwitting dupe into bringing some diamonds in from the US. It's a serious violation of the law, and one that threatens to leave Donna in prison.

But from where the movie has been up to ths point, you have to expect that Come Fly With Me is going to have a more or less happy ending. Come Fly With Me is a pleasant enough movie that I can't help but think for audiences in early 1963 provided them with lovely views of Europe in color and wide-screen cinematography that was beyond the means of a lot of them. (Unfortunately, the print looked off in that many of the location shots seemed to have badly faded colors.) The story isn't all that much, but it's not actively bad. It's just more formulaic and dated.

So while Come Fly With Me is definitely not the best movie out there, it's also not terrible, and a relaxing enough way to spend 109 minutes.