An absconding bank clerk takes passage for himself and £10,000 of the bank's money on a plane called the Golden Eagle. After a struggle in the passenger compartment, the pilot is forced to land in the distant mountains. The bank clerk steals the remaining food from the other passengers and leaves them to their fates. Wandering in the mountains, he becomes half mad with isolation and guilt before he is found by a prospector. Back in civilisation, he continues to be tortured by guilt before he finally confesses to police some years after the crash.
The film was based loosely on the idea of the disappearance, in 1931, of the aircraft South Cloud, in transit between Sydney and Melbourne.
Contemporary reviews were mixed. One notes:
'If one is to spend an hour on a mountain top with seven, stranded travellers it is desirable that they should be amusing or interesting in some way or other. Except for the pilot (played extremely well by John Darcy) they are ill at ease, and their conversation is starchy. This conversational stiffness is emphasised by the lack of action, particularly on the part of the camera, which is set down in front of the unhappy party, and stays there without a movement for minutes on end. But the film has its moments of vitality. The actual crash is first-rate; and quite equal to similar instances in American pictures. The preceding scene, in the cockpit of the 'plane, is forcefully handled. In some of the scenes in the bush one is made to feel the remoteness of the travellers and the hopelessness of their position; but elsewhere stagey treatment and acting often rob the film of the spontaneity and the dramatic intensity it should have possessed.'
Source:
'Film Reviews', Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 1934, p.2.
