The President's Plane Is Missing Reviews

The President's Plane Is Missing benefited from a good cast and a decent plot (derived from the novel by Robert Serling, Rod's brother), but mostly from impeccable timing. The Watergate scandal was starting to boil over in the fall of 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had resigned just a couple of weeks before the movie's broadcast, and the subjects of presidential succession and who really runs the government in a crisis were on the mind of just about everybody. The original impetus for the production was almost certainly the success that NBC had enjoyed with its two-part mini-series broadcast of Vanished, in March of 1971 -- that production had used a mix of veteran and familiar performers (led by Richard Widmark in his first television feature role), augmented by the presence of some real-life Washington news figures to give it verisimilitude. The President's Plane Is Missing had no star of Widmark's stature in its cast, and only Howard K. Smith to represent the real-life Washington press corps, but it almost made up for these shortcomings with its cast. Between veteran troupers like Raymond Massey and Arthur Kennedy, and Buddy Ebsen in an unusually non-benevolent role for this period in his career, plus the presence of Rip Torn (in a role that seemed to have overtones of Henry Kissinger's image in the public mind), as well as Mercedes McCambridge doing a modern day Lady Macbeth turn, there was a lot of acting talent assembled here, most of it well utilized. The production still looked a bit threadbare, and its relatively optimistic ending seems too pat today, but at the time it made for two hours of diverting viewing with a topical edge, and it's still an enjoyable artifact of the early 1970's.