[US production filmed in the Philippines back-to-back with “Back Door To Hell” (1964). Working title “The Devil’s Game”]
Director Monte Hellman Story Fred Roos, Monte Hellman Screenplay Jack Nicholson Producer Fred Roos Executive Producers Michael J. Parsons [as M.J. Parsons], [uncredited] Eddie Romero, Robert L. Lippert Associated Producer Walter Phelps Cinematography Mike Accion Music Nestor Robles Editors Joven Calub, [uncredited] Monte Hellman Production Coordinator F.H. de Sena Production Manager Artemio B. Tecson Assistant Director Jose M. Dagumboy [as J.M. Dagumboy] Makeup Artist Baby Buencamino Wardrobe Paquito Salcedo
Cast Dewey Martin (Joe Gaines), Fay Spain (Destiny Cooper), Jack Nicholson (Jay Wickham), Joseph Estrada (Garuda), Vic Diaz (Vincent Lorgren), Jacqueline Hellman [as Jaclyn Hellman] (Gloria Walsh), Juliet Pardo (Lei Ling Forsyth), John Hackett (Al Ross), Vic Uematsu (Japanese Assistant), Lucien Pan (Police Inspector), Henry Duval (Rafael, Lorgren’s Henchman), Serafin Sicat, Joe Dagumboy, Robert Arevalo (Co-Pilot), Jennings Sturgeon (Bearded Man on Boat)
ACTION
1964 - Cordillera (Filipinas Productions/Lippert Films Inc)
[Release date 24th October 1964; filmed in Tagalog on the set of Monte Hellman's American production "Flight To Fury"]
PHILIPPINES CREDITS Directors Eddie Romero, Monte Hellman Screenplay Eddie Romero, Jack Nicholson Producers Fred Roos, Michael J. Parsons [as M.J. Parsons] Music Nestor Robles Layout Artist Eddie Domer
Cast Joseph Estrada, Dewey Martin, Fay Spain, Robert Arevalo, Vic Diaz, Imelda Ilanan, Ely Ramos Jr, Henry Duval, Juliet Pardo
ACTION
NOTES by Andrew Leavold: Filmed back-to-back with Monte Hellman and Jack Nicholson’s Back Door To Hell (1964), reviewed HERE; my interview with Hellman about the making of both films is HERE.
Flight To Fury was the second feature to be filmed by Robert Lippert and Fred Roos’ production company in the Philippines around late August and September 1964, and is always considered the poor cousin of the two. Rather than using Back Door…’s local production team of Ronald Remy’s Medallion Films, Roos used the same company on his previous Filipino venture, Amuck (aka Moro Witch Doctor, 1964). Filipinas Productions’ Eddie Romero and Michael J. Parsons then borrowed most of the cast (notably minus Nicholson) and Eddie directed new Tagalog-language scenes for his own edit titled Cordillera.
In the modern noir script of Flight To Fury, Jack Nicholson wrote himself the juicy role of antagonist and, in the process, crafted one of his early career’s most ambiguous and multi-layered characters. The film’s main protagonist is Joe Gaines (Dewey Martin), a penniless American drifter in South East Asia, cadging drinks off fellow American Jay Wickham (Nicholson), self-professed bad luck Jonah and card-carrying nihilist. A chance meeting with the aloof nightclub hostess Lei Ling (Juliet Pardo) leaves one dead body and Gaines on the next plane out of the country along with a motley group of expats – among them Wickham, slimy “businessman” Vincent Lorgren (Vic Diaz), and Lorgren’s blonde companion Destiny Cooper (Fay Spain).
Shady characters with secrets and murky motives and a subplot of missing diamonds are set up before the plane loses an engine and crash-lands in the Filipino jungle, wiping out several passengers – but not before the dying pilot, Joe’s contact Al Ross (Back Door To Hell’s John Hackett), hands him the diamonds, and tells him they’re the reason for Lai Ling’s murder. The survivors force their way through the hostile environment battling the anonymous jungle, their own mistrust, and a group of bandidos led by the sleazy, lecherous Garuda, played by future Philippines president Joseph Estrada. A veteran of almost two hundred Tagalog films, curiously this is his only English language film, as his small but utterly memorable role is the only one in the cast to match the greasiness of the venerable Vic Diaz.
Nicholson, of course, is the Creator of Flight To Fury’s paranoid microcosmos and, as such, gives himself the most intriguing character and the film's best lines ("Are you interested in death?" he asks doomed plane passenger Gloria, played by Hellman’s then-wife Jacklyn). In typical Filipino fashion, the film’s co-producer Eddie Romero directed new scenes for a local version called Cordillera after the American cast left, using local actors and his own Tagalog script in which Joseph Estrada is recast as the hero. In a country where 90% of their film history has not survived, this version has not surprisingly disappeared forever, but we are left with the Nicholson/Hellman version, perhaps the finest moment from their combined early careers.
Flight To Fury in Brad Stevens' book "Monte Hellman: His Life and Films" (reproduced her for research purposes only; apologies to the copyright holder)
Jack Nicholson's screenplay for Monte Hellman's second film for Robert Lippert was adapted from a plot outline by Hellman and Fred Roos. According to Hellman, “I remember that Fred and I discussed the original idea (perhaps he had some ideas to begin with), and worked out the bare outlines. Jack wrote the script on the three week voyage by ship, giving me pages daily for approval of the direction it was going. The one thing Jack and I agreed on is that it was a kind of parody, an homage, particularly to a movie that we liked a lot, which was John Huston's Beat The Devil. Our aim was really to make it funny. Jack and I decided to call it The Devil's Game (from “Beat the Devil at his own game”), and I guess it was Lippert who changed it to Flight To Fury.”
Flight To Fury began shooting in Manila soon after Hellman left the hospital, with four of the same actors as Back Door To Hell: Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Henry Duval and Vic Uematsu. This time, the box-office draw was Dewey Martin, star of several Howard Hawks films, while Fay Spain (who had appeared in Lippert’s production Thunder Island, co-scripted by Nicholson) took the female lead.
Set in a nameless part of the Far East, Flight To Fury begins with a dialogueless sequence showing Al Ross (John Hackett) being given a small pouch by a man (Jennings Sturgeon) living on a houseboat. Vincent Lorgren (Vic Diaz) and Destiny Cooper (Fay Spain) clandestinely observe this transaction from a nearby car. We are then introduced to Joe Gaines (Dewey Martin), who has just lost all his money gambling. A seemingly friendly fellow American called Jay Wickam (Jack Nicholson) buys Joe a drink, but vanishes while Joe is talking to Lei Ling Forsyth (Juliet Pardo), who was present during Al's meeting with the man on the houseboat. Lei Ling invites Joe to her room, but while Joe takes a shower, Jay appears and murders her. When Joe returns to his hotel after being interrogated by the police, he finds Jay waiting and has him deliver a message to Al Ross. Joe catches a commercial flight on which Al is the pilot, and is surprised to discover Jay aboard. The other passengers include Lorgren, Destiny, two Japanese men, and a young woman, Gloria Walsh (Jaclyn Hellman), with whom Jay discusses games and the meaning of death. The plane crashes in the jungle, killing Gloria. The older Japanese man is seriously injured, and Lorgren’s leg is broken. Al also dies in the crash, but survives long enough to give Joe the pouch, which contains stolen diamonds. After Lorgren forces Joe to surrender the diamonds, a group of bandits led by Garuda (Joseph Estrada) kill the older Japanese man and take the remaining survivors hostage. Destiny is raped by Garuda, and the younger Japanese man dies as the captives escape. Jay takes the diamonds from Lorgren, then kills him and Destiny. Joe pursues Hay through a rocky landscape, managing to shoot him by a river. Jay throws the pouch into the water and commits suicide.
Hellman edited Flight To Fury before returning to Los Angeles (on the S.S. Oronsay) in October, but was once again denied credit for contractual reasons (the editing credit went to his assistant, Joven Calub). As Hellman recalls, "The picture editing was done in the Philippines, including adjusting the sound, which got recorded at the wrong speed and was therefore out of sync and the wrong pitch. The dialogue eventually had to be sunk up much as you would do with looped dialogue. We did sound fx and music editing in Jim Nelsons garage in the San Fernando Valley.” Dismayed by the film’s quirky tone, Robert Lippert insisted on re-editing. Hellman recalls that “Lippert looked at my cut and said about some scenes: 'People will laugh at that!’, which of course was our intent. He cut the discussion about death between Jack and Jaclyn Hellman, as well as some of the repartee between Dewey and Fay on the plane.” In the end, Lippert removed 11 minutes of footage, reducing the film to a 62 minute fragment which was barely released theatrically before being sold to television. Fortunately, Hellman was later able to restore his 73 minute director’s cut for the U.S. video release: “I know that the Warners version is complete, since I restored the negative and made a new print for Warners.”
One of the most curious aspects of Flight To Fury's production is that an alternate, Tagalog-language version entitled Cordillera, intended solely for distribution in the Philippines, was directed by Eddie Romero. According to Romero, “I did a Filipino version of it at the same time, which means I added some scenes and changed it around a bit. There is an outlaw in Flight To Fury, who I turned into a hero. And that character was played by Joseph Estrada, who is now running to be President of the Philippines.” Since Cordillera is not easily available (even Hellman, who remembers Romero as “a joy to work with,” has never seen it), any comments on its relationship to Flight To Fury must remain purely speculative, though given that Joseph Estrada spends his few minutes of screen time in Hellman's film executing crash victims and raping women, the revisions required to turn him into a hero must have been extensive.
If Flight To Fury represents another artistic forward leap, its negative reception by Robert Lippert is clearly traceable to the emergence of those concerns which would define Hellman’s later masterpieces while condemning him to commercial marginalization. The filmmakers’ stated intention was to reproduce the tone of Beat The Devil (1953), a quirky work which took many years to achieve cult status (indeed, Hellman and Nicholson must have been among its earliest admirers). But whereas Beat The Devil's more bizarre elements are primarily satirical, the equivalent moments in Flight To Fury come across quite differently, their purpose being to disrupt the narrative’s smooth progress. The film begins as a traditional thriller involving a Hitchcockian McGuffin, the diamonds, a hardboiled hero, Joe Gaines, and what appears to be an audience surrogate, Jay Wickam. The first jolt to our expectations occurs 10 minutes in when Jay murders Lei Ling Forsyth (a name that reappears as a brand of tea in The Shooting — the reference was Carole Eastman’s idea), but perhaps Hellman’s boldest stroke is the plane journey, during which the narrative comes to a halt while the characters debate abstract theoretical issues. Hellman’s taste for very lengthy scenes was already apparent in Beast From Haunted Cave and Back Door To Hell, but Flight To Fury takes this to a new level, and it is hardly surprising that the plane sequence — which runs a full fifteen minutes in Hellman’s version — bore the brunt of Lippert’s cuts. The rest of the film may seem to conform more precisely with the action-adventure formula, but its sheer eclecticism — a crash in the jungle and the survivors’ subsequent attempts to reach safety is followed by a shoot-out with some bandits and a fight to the death over a pouch of diamonds — reveals the authors’ satirical intentions, while the rapid pace contrasts oddly with the meditative plane scenes. Hellman is here acting on the same impulse that inspired him to mix the gangster and horror genres in Beast From Haunted Cave, and the same swerves and contrasts can be found in the work of Quentin Tarantino, whose Sight and Sound article on Hellman draws attention to the influence: “As can be seen from the film I made, I like what I call ‘kitchen-sink movies’, which means ‘there’s everything in it but...,’ and there are about four movies crammed into Flight To Fury.”
Flight To Fury's most obvious antecedent is Creature From The Haunted Sea, in which Hellman satirized a male adventure genre (with explicit reference to Beat The Devil). Here, Hellman undercuts both the heroic protagonist and those narrative structures that support and reinforce him, and in this he is working within a strong American anti-tradition that includes such masterpieces as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and, supremely, Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998). If the heroic role was, for all intents and purposes, absent from Back Door To Hell, it is here insistently present, but subjected to a thorough critique that goes far beyond Beat The Devil's good-humored tolerance (anticipating the much darker tone of Huston’s The Kremlin Letter). Like Gil in Beast From Haunted Cave and XK150 in Creature From The Haunted Sea, Joe embodies a masculine ideal that is demonstrated to be ludicrous, untenable and ultimately destructive. Emotional withdrawal is here stripped of those positive connotations associated with Humphrey Bogart’s roles for Huston (Beat The Devil included) and becomes an indicator of neuroticism. Although Joe goes through the motions of heroism, Hellman never lets us forget that he is motivated purely by greed.
Jay’s obsession is simultaneously reinforced and critiqued by Flight To Fury’s narrative convolutions. If Hellman uses elaborate plot mechanics to deconstruct the action genre, it is also the case that his characters perceive themselves as participants in an elaborate fiction. Jay’s explanation of why he is following Joe - “I wanted to see how it all came out” - and his reaction to having survived the crash - “I’m getting kind of a boot out of it” - link him with the vicariously participating cinema viewer, while his command “no games” (as he forces Lorgren to hand over the diamonds) imbricates this view of life as a fiction-making activity with the game-playing subtext.
The film’s key motif — the one that unites and clarifies each of the film’s disparate elements—is that of control, a concern which emerges at several points in the dialogue (Jay claims that the idea of suicide gives a man “control” while Lorgren plans to “take control of the situation”) and is expressed in several seemingly distinct but nevertheless overlapping ways:
Control of Money: Joe and Jay are introduced losing at cards, and later pursue an object of great financial value, which they also lose.
Control of Women: In Flight To Fury specifically, and our culture generally, the desire to control women always implies a repressed homosexual impulse. Joe’s most intimate relationships are with Al and (in a different way) Jay. Indeed, Joe’s antagonism towards the latter (evident from his hostile glances when they first meet) is surely traceable to the fact that Jay’s flamboyant nature brings his sexual attractiveness close to the surface. Hellman here makes brilliant use of Jack Nicholson’s tendency to play every conversation as if it were a seduction (by contrast, Dewey Martin treats actual seductions as if they were disagreeable business meetings). The indirect revelation that Jay had been hiding in the bedroom closet while Lei Ling and Joe made love suggests a barely concealed homosexuality (Hellman’s play on the phrase “in the closet” is wonderfully sly) which casts a dark shadow over Joe’s compulsive womanizing. The two men cement their “friendship” by subjecting women to a process of objectification in which a fear of active female sexuality is remarkably close to the surface. Jay informs Joe that if he ever wants to see “the ugliest women in the world” he should go to Boise Idaho, then boasts of how he once “dated” the “Queen” of Idaho (“she was a throwaway anywhere else”), a disc jockey who ran an all-night radio show from a tower (“I dated her right up there in the tower”), which in turn reminds Joe of “a lady fortune teller I knew once in Macao.” The two men try to deny their mutual attraction by sharing stories of sexual conquests, and it is telling that once Jay leaves, Joe immediately attempts to seduce Lei Ling, whom he believes to be Al’s lover.
Control of the Narrative: If Joe believes himself to be the star of a hero-centered narrative in which he has the power to determine his own fate, the film’s erratic structure mocks him at every turn (again, one might compare New Rose Hotel), and the character names selected by Hellman and Nicholson neatly imbricate this idea with the control of women theme: Joe can control neither destiny nor Destiny.
Control of One’s Self: Hellman’s characters are notable for their rigorous attempts at self-control, most obvious from the uninflected, emotionless way he has actors recite dialogue. Of course, this attempt is critically placed by the director, who shows his protagonists falling prey to emotional entanglements and physical needs. Flight To Fury places great emphasis on bodily injury, and one might claim that the contrast between the meditative plane sequence and the more rapidly paced sections that follow reflects a movement from philosophy to reality. In the security of an aircraft, the characters can debate the meaning of death and play games with nothing but token penalties, whereas the injuries they sustain during the crash, as well as the savagery of the terrain, force them to translate theoretical issues into concrete necessities. This movement is reflected in the contrast between the chief of police, who complains that there are “questions still unanswered” after outlining a logical (if totally incorrect) argument in his neatly ordered office, and Garuda, who acts on sheer animal impulse in the middle of the jungle.
Needless to say, this complex mesh of themes is implicitly feminist in its assumptions. Although Destiny is as corrupt as any of the men, the film’s morality is embodied by Gloria Walsh, a character who is a) a woman, and b) played by the director’s wife. One might even connect Jack Nicholson’s habit of using his fellow passengers’ behavior as material for a screenplay with the fact that Gloria is seen making notes (the subject and purpose of which she fails to divulge), and assume that she is, at least partially, a stand-in for the screenwriter. What remains beyond question is that Gloria’s lack of neuroticism implictly critiques the masculine obsessiveness displayed by Joe, Jay, Al, Lorgren, Garuda and even Destiny, all of whom single-mindedly pursue financial gain. Hellman’s willingness to be sidetracked by a character with no narrative relevance corresponds to that character’s gentle refusal to accept Jay’s death-oriented view of existence as an unchanging truth rather than a social construct, and if none of the survivors shows the slightest sense of loss at her death (even Joe’s insistence on burying the bodies seems motivated less by respect for the dead than his need to win a power struggle with Jay), the warmth of Jaclyn Hellman’s performance (she is essentially repeating her characterization from the 1962 version of Beast From Haunted Cave) ensures that Gloria’s demise leaves a gaping hole at the film’s center. Perhaps the most important moment occurs when Gloria admits she is “no good at games,” a statement which is both casual and of the greatest import. Hellman’s oeuvre will henceforth be devoted to examining what it means to be no good at games,’ and the position occupied by those women who might plausibly make such a claim in a world of male game-players.
OTHER REVIEWS
Vijay Varman’s review on the Circle Of Cinema website
Derek Winnert’s review on his website
Tom Newth’s capsule review on his Time Out Film Guide blog
Jonathan Lewis’ review on the Mystery File blog
...and unnamed actors (if you can identify them, please contact us)
THEATRICAL
OTHER TERRITORIES (unconfirmed but listed on IMDB): Spain [as “Viaje a la ira”], West Germany [as “Jagdflug”]
VIDEO
mp4 files (feature and video trailer)
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