Review of Flight to Fury

A plane goes down in the jungle carrying several people who want to lay hands on some stolen diamonds that the pilot is carrying. The opening thirty minutes or so are very dull, but it improves slightly after that. Nicholson isn't bad in a major supporting role, but his writing on the film is weak. (According to director Monte Hellman, who co-wrote the story, Nicholson wrote the script on the three week cruise from San Francisco to Manila, sitting in the ship's lounge and incorporating the conversations he had with anyone who passed by into the script. It plays like that's true, with some fairly random and not very interesting dialog early in the film.) Dewey Martin makes a dull hero. The jungle locations aren't bad.

This film was made back-to-back with "Back Door To Hell," a somewhat better WWII film that also features Nicholson in a supporting role. Hellman was busy at nights editing "Back Door To Hell" at the same time that he was shooting "Flight to Fury."