Review of Flight Overdue

This is an odd story with an odd denouement. Donald Bennett (Walter Brooke) agonizes over his aviatrix wife gone missing four years earlier, even while remarried to current wife Deirdre (Mary Stuart McDonald). Flashback scenes relate how Paula Martin Bennett (Veronica Lake) was enthralled with her career at the expense of her marriage, away from home for increasingly long periods while maintaining secrecy even from her husband. Recruited for a secret government program, it's revealed that she was involved in training missions with a goal of flying a rocket to the moon! Now I know the Fifties were simpler times, but when family friend Sam Rutgers (Thom Conroy) stated that the rocket was going to carry three men and Paula to the moon I had to groan. Why would anyone consider sending a newly designed aircraft on a manned flight to the moon on its very first mission? That just didn't make sense, but I guess you have to consider the simplicity of televised scripts at the time. But the kicker occurs at the conclusion of the story when Rutgers was finally at liberty to mention that Paula and the rest died when the rocket ship crashed on the moon. At that point, Donald Bennett became ecstatic, stating that he hated Paula for the way she was during their marriage! By doing so, he contradicted all of his earlier behavior of pining for the wife that he held out hope for being alive. Very strange.

By the way, if you're intrigued by the casting of Veronica Lake in this short program, don't expect to see the blonde bombshell of "The Blue Dahlia" or "This Gun for Hire" from the Forties. Here she's very plain looking in those flashback scenes with short, dark hair and missing the charisma from her glory days. Still, it was an interesting casting choice and would peg this early anthology series with a former star celebrity.