Steve Cochran is a pilot stranded in Lisbon without a job. He crashed a plane, and although he was held blameless, no one wants to hire him. Then a one-way ticket to Lourenço Marques, (now Maputo) in Mozambique shows up, so he takes a Lufthansa(?) flight. His prospective employer is dead, but the organization is still active, and its current head, Martin Benson, takes him on, while he fights with widow Hildegarde Neff for control. Cochran soon discovers that a pilot is needed for flying illegal drugs around, and for smuggling. After an hour, there's a corpse to deal with.
Martin Curtis' camerawork is excellent, but the movie is wrecked by the editor, Peter Boita. The pacing is glacial, with Cochran needing twenty minutes to get out of Portugal. The movie times in at a hundred minutes, but it might have been a zippy seventy except that director Robert Lynn likes to show people strolling about, taking them from a car to a hotel's door, or shoot a chase scene with as few cuts as possible, and Boita indulges him in this.
Johnny Douglas' score makes this pace even more evident by the music he uses during what should be exciting scenes: he uses scales on a guitar, single notes taking about a second each.
Martin Curtis' camerawork is excellent, but the movie is wrecked by the editor, Peter Boita. The pacing is glacial, with Cochran needing twenty minutes to get out of Portugal. The movie times in at a hundred minutes, but it might have been a zippy seventy except that director Robert Lynn likes to show people strolling about, taking them from a car to a hotel's door, or shoot a chase scene with as few cuts as possible, and Boita indulges him in this.
Johnny Douglas' score makes this pace even more evident by the music he uses during what should be exciting scenes: he uses scales on a guitar, single notes taking about a second each.