I get to watch movies and drink coffee all evening. The lineup tonight is a 1970s production called Murder on Flight 502. At least I think 1975 or so because there is a 747 in many scenes. (I rode in one of the first 747 flights on New Years Eve, 1973.) The cast is ‘noteworthy’, including Rob’t Stack as the pilot (gag), and Sonny Bono as a rock star (double gag). Remember that twerp Danny Bonaduce? He plays a 13 year old rich kid. Isn’t that a little bit like casting Farrah Fawcett as a stewardess? That would be just too corny.
Hold on. Fawcett is there, and behold, she is a stewardess. Wasn’t George Maharis on Route 66? At any rate, the acting is on a league with Bonanza re-runs and I’m writting off two of the other actors with the last name Stack as pure coincidence.
The movie is supposed to take place at 36,000 feet. There are clouds flying past outside the portholes. There is a portrayal of early abuse of police and medical records to create a suspect list of the passengers. Old movies can be so comforting, especially if you believe that only slim, well-mannered and cultured people wearing their best clothes ever fly, and remain stone sober throughout.
You’re also asked to accept that the cabin contains, so far, an author, a priest, a dress designer, a famous doctor, a sexy teenybopper who likes older men, a stalker, a police detective and some elderly people who are just saints. I once read that at any given time, there is the population of a small city flying across the Atlantic. It must have been a very small city, for not only was the stalker after the said doctor, but the parents of the groupie who got pregnant from our rock star all on the same flight. Budda-bing!
The second movie is based on fact. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. He killed a sheriff in self-defence, but the idea that the cops are always the good guys was just as much a part of court trials a hundred years ago as today. He got fifty years from a trained jury. The movie seems realistic, especially how the prosecution ignores all the facts about why he killed and focused on the fact that he killed. Under Texas law, you are allowed to defend yourself against an unlawful arrest, even to the point of using deadly force.
He managed to elude 600 Texas rangers who had telephones, telegraphs and railway trains on his trail. That part of law has always intrigued me, that you can be charged with evading justice by running away. Yet justice says you are innocent until proven guilty, so how can you evade justice by running away? Are you, yourself, supposed to break the law by presuming yourself to be guilty? Thinking you are guilty, even if you committed the crime, is technically illegal in this country.
