MartinHafer Perhaps it's just me, but doesn't Robert Taylor look awfully old for this role? Now he wasn't THAT old, but the late 1950s, he went from looking handsome and vigorous to very tired. And, in general, so did his performances. Here, he plays a disaffected American pilot who responds to his war experiences by dropping off the map. Instead of returning home to his adoring wife (Dorothy Malone), he moves to Madrid and sends a letter to his wife--asking for a divorce. However, Malone is not content to just do this and so she goes to Spain to try to figure out what's happened to a once excellent husband. Once there, he seems happy to see her--but also without direction and occasionally a bit of a jerk.Into this boring reunion comes a smuggler who offers to pay Taylor a ton of money. He refuses it but his young partner (Jack Lord) gets involved. But, because Lord is involved with a young lady, Taylor does the macho thing--punching Lord and flying this mission instead--even though he has PTSD due to his combat experiences. Will Taylor make it alive? Does anyone really care? The biggest problem about this film is that it's hard to really give a darn about Taylor. He seems, at times, whiny and hard to like. And, after just a bit of this, you wonder why his wife would even want him back in the first place. Overall, a time-passer and not much more.

sol ***SPOILERS*** One of Actor Robert Taylor's forgotten movies that I suspect he hoped would stay forgotten in him playing WWII and Korean war hero Llyod Tredman who lost his nerve as a pilot in him sending scores of USAF fighter pilots to their deaths in the Korean War. Feeling that he's a complete failure in life Tredman dropped out of sight and became a full time moocher in far off Madrid Spain. Staying at his good friend and sidekick's as well as fellow moocher Toto, Marcel Daio, pad Tredman just gets himself drunk and reminisces about old times.It's when Tredman tried to divorce his wife Phyllis, Dorothy Malone, in him feeling he's not good enough for her that he opened up a can of worms in having her fly to Spain from Navada to see if there's anything wrong, in the head, with her estranged husband. Trying to make money betting on the horses, to show Phyllis what a big time gambler he is, Tredman puts his last 1,000 in Spanish currency on a horse he 's a part owner of only to have the horse and its jockey Alfredo, Jimmy Murphy, tripped up in the stretch with both, horse and jockey, ending up dead. Broke and facing eviction Tredman finally gives into mobster Bert Smith, Martin Gable, offer to fly a plane with 85 pounds of British 5 pound notes, worth some 200,000 dollars, from Cairo Egypt and then on the return trip drop them in an empty field outside Madrid for Smith and his hoods to grab! For this dangerous mission Smith offers Tredman $25,000.00.Things get even more complicated then they already are with Tredman's good friend and Air Force buddy Jimmy Heldor, Jack Lord, taking up Smith's offer in that the yellow bellied Tredman doesn't have the stomach to do the job. It's when Jimmy almost lost his life, by getting himself lost over the Mediterranean Sea, in a dry run that Tredman decides against his better judgment to do the flying! That's only if Toto, who never flew a plane in his life, agrees to be his co-pilot.***SPOILERS*** The movie gets overly confusing and ridicules with a at first scared out of his wits Tredman suddenly getting his courage, in flying an airplane, back as he flies rings around, on land as well as in the air, those trying to stop him in his secret mission for gangster Bert Smith. It's only later that Tredman finds out that Smith is actually using him to smuggle heroin not British 5 pound notes back into Spain that really turns him off! In the end Tredman sets Smith, who planned to murder him as soon as he landed, up by having the Madrid police and INTEPOL Agents nab him and his henchman before they could make their successful getaway. Now with both his courage and wife Phyills back Tredman can go back to the life that he abandoned back in Korea by getting his job back as a commercial pilot instead of being the leach and good for nothing bum that he had since become.

Robert J. Maxwell 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.

art_27 A wooden treatment of a shell shocked Korean war vet expatting it in Madrid. Malone barely registers ennui, disillusionment, or any other weight of the world characteristics; he acts more like the suburban dad opting not to shave all weekend. Dalio, the Casablanca croupier, is reduced to playing Malone's colorful sidekick, but a little goes a long way. Jack Lord and his Kennedyesque hairdo go through the motions. Bits of the script, co-written by Shaw, stand out, especially Malone comparing his domestic situation to a Balzac story, "too many people." The title drew me in, and I got a pig in a poke.