***SPOILERS*** A lot like the story "The Jacket" about mind over matter by Jack London where with the help of fellow convict Pete Tuttle,Cameron Mitchell, that lifer Charlie Finnigan, Burgess Meredith,is able to escape to freedom through the power of suggestion that Tuttle provided him with. It's Tuttle who worked as a hypnotist in a circus who's able to convince Charlie he can be anything he wants to be even a passenger jet if only he puts his mind to it. This has the prison doctor Simsich, Barry Sullivan, let Tuttle go the full nine yards in experimenting with Charlie's mind in if nothing else it would benefit the advancement of hypnotic projection.
With the prison warden Kenneth Toby who against his better judgment goes on letting Tuttle do his thing with Charlie he gets him to think that he's actually a passenger jet flying at 30,000 feet and about to make a crash landing. Tied down in his prison bed Charlie soon loses conciseness and starts to heat up turning all colors of the rainbow-Finnigan's Raindow-and crashes to earth incinerating himself and almost his entire cell-block!
A totally confused and flabbergasted Pete Tuttle as well as Dr. Simsich and prison warden soon realize that they went too far in their experiment with Charlie in causing his death! But as for Charlie, like the convict in the Jack London novel "The Jacket", he was now free as a bird if not in body but definitely in spirit able to fly as high and fast as he wants without being confined to a jail cell that he was condemned to spend the rest of his natural life in. A life that Charlie Finnigan made for himself that now with the help of a startled Pete Tuttle who was shocked-down to his socks-by his own ability to get Charlie air borne that Charlie was able to free himself from.