Robert Taylor is an irresponsible ex-pilot surviving in Madrid on is winnings at roulette and he's visited by his wife, Dorothy Malone, on whom he ran out. What's his problem? Well, he's been a pilot in two wars and it's eroded his confidence. (Kids: Those two wars are World War II and Korea. PS: We won the first and drew a stalemate on the second. PPS: Madrid is in Spain.) He even had to quit his job flying for a commercial airline.
Other characters include his egregiously unfunny comic sidekick, Marcel Dalio, his flying buddy Jack Lord, and Lord's wife Gia Scala. Taylor is cutely, kiddingly, flirtatious with Lord's wife, wisecracking that it's the job of a man's best friend, to be in love with the best friend's wife.
Enter the unctuous Martin Gabel, short and bald, who offers Taylor an amazing sum to simply fly some money from Egypt to Sicily for an Egyptian millionaire. Gabel engineers an accident in a horse race that kills the jockey and leaves Taylor broke. But Taylor still doesn't accept, and not just on moral grounds but because he's terrified of flying an airplane. No single traumatic episode lies behind the phobia. It's simply that there has been an accretion of guilt over the responsibilities he's had that have led to the death of so many of his friends. If that sounds like a loose end, a weakness in the plot, it's not. It would have been far easier to pin the blame on an accident while Taylor was at the controls, the kind of hoary cliché parodied in "Airplane." Taylor's demons are more diffuse, more challenging.
At any rate, if Taylor himself is uninterested in undertaking this illegal but "perfectly safe" smuggling deal, his best friend Jack Lord is not. Lord accepts the job and returns three days later, revealing that it turned out to be more dangerous than described but only a dry run.
Lord is anxious to get going again but he's not the flier that Taylor is, so Taylor cold cocks him and takes off with Dalio seated beside him. It develops that there is more to the job than simply smuggling some harmless cash from Egypt into Italy. Gabel is a treacherous murderer.
The title is keen, isn't it? "Tip On A Dead Jockey"? And the death of the jockey is integral to the plot. Further, the story itself is full of potential. International smuggling, with a sweating Robert Taylor jockeying the endangered airplane through the sky, pursued by pursuit planes, and Dalio making wisecracks and swilling booze out of the bottle?
And, in fact, the script isn't unintelligently written. There is a scene, for instance, in which Dorothy Malone has an shouting argument with Taylor and pins down his psychodynamics in a most convincing manner, that explains such otherwise obscure plot elements as Taylor's flirting with Lord's wife -- not that it's been in any way bothersome to anyone.
But it doesn't rise above the mediocre. I was trying to figure out why it didn't. I think the problem lies with the uninspired direction by Richard Thorpe and the stiff, routinized acting of some of the principals. Marcel Dalio, in a familiar role, doesn't go wrong, but Jack Lord sounds like the TV personality he was to become, Taylor's range is limited to grim sincerity, and the lovely Dorothy Malone can't act at all. Gia Scala is animated enough and queerly attractive.
But the direction is approached as if it were some humdrum job, fixing a flat tire or something. It's Spain but without color. There is no poetry in it.
I'll give one example of what I mean. At a party, Taylor is playing up to Gia Scala, showing a little more than the amount of affection called for, and Taylor's wife, Malone, is watching with interest. There are several reaction shots of her. And that's all she does. She watches. She stares at the semi-seductive exchange between her husband and another man's wife without the slightest hint of embarrassment, jealousy, irritation, anxiety, or any of the other emotions a normally loving and possessive spouse would display. Thorpe never asked her to lower her gaze or turn away or change her expression. It's as if the director's thoughts went no farther than, "Let's see -- the flirting calls for the three of them to be in the shot so I'll put the camera here. Then, for a close up, I'll put the camera over here. There, that's it!"
I'll let it go at that. It's a great title. The movie isn't dislikable. It's just that it would have been even easier to smuggle in the drama than it was to smuggle in the illegal cash. The failure is due to pilot error.
