Alan Hale Jr. Is known to most as 'Skipper' from "Gilligan's Island"...a nice, likable sort of character. But in "Arctic Flight", Hale plays a communist agent who is trying to get secrets to his evil overlords in the Soviet Union!! Normally, I don't mention important plot points like this, but since IMDB already divulges what sort of character Hale plays, then mentioning how against type this is for him is certainly in order.
Now the communist agent is not the only plot. In fact, this character doesn't come into the story until about the midway point. The first portion is devoted to an annoying woman (due to bad writing) and her really annoying meet cute with Mike Wien...the man who is a bush pilot who operates the only airline in the area. She is a school teacher who wants him to take her to an island...but he doesn't want to since it's on the US-Soviet border and he doesn't want to get shot down by mistake. Well, he relents and takes her...though she is annoying and cliched and should have been written better.
After completing this task, he's offered a huge amount of money to fly a millionaire on a polar bear hunt. But John Wetherby isn't interested in bears...but poses as a nice rich guy in order to make his nefarious plan hard to anticipate. Eventually, he's going to force Mike to take him to Russian airspace....like it or not!
This film is a definite sign of its times. The Cold War (no pun intended) was at its hottest and US-Soviet relations were at their lowest point. As a result, many Hollywood pictures were about communist spies and the like...and I can only assume the Soviet film industry was doing films about the wicked West.
So is this any good? Yes and no. Morris is very good...with a nice, casual sort of performance. The school teacher, as I mentioned, was not written well and eliminating this plot completely would have made for a better film. Well worth seeing despite its faults...plus, I did like the exciting finale.
