Jet Pilot (film)

A Soviet Air Force jet lands on a U.S. Air Force air base in Alaska. The Air Force base commander, Colonel Jim Shannon is surprised to see that the pilot is a woman, Lieutenant Anna Marladovna, who asks for asylum, but refuses to disclose military information. Col. Shannon is assigned to seduce her to persuade her to talk, but falls in love with her in the process. Worried about the possibility of Anna's deportation, he marries her without permission. When they return from their unauthorized honeymoon, Major General Black takes Jim aside and informs him that they have discovered that his new wife is a spy, sent to relay information back to the USSR. The Americans decide to play along, but to turn the situation to their advantage. Jim goes home to tell Anna that she is to be imprisoned for years, and then deported when she is finally released. To save her, they hatch an escape plan, steal an aircraft, and fly to Soviet airspace. Their arrival is not shown, but Anna is criticized for having allowed Shannon to crash the more advanced American aircraft when Russian fighters closed in, rather than fighting back. She says that she considered shooting him, but decided that he would be more valuable for his knowledge than the plane would have been. While they are there, Jim discovers that Anna is pregnant. He is then assigned to help test new aircraft, but it is a pretext for drugging him and pumping him for information about American aircraft. He learns much about Soviet capabilities from the questions he is asked, while only giving up outdated information in return. When Anna discovers this, and that he is secretly making notes, she pistol whips him about the head. She initially plans to turn him in, but she then learns he is to be exchanged for Soviet prisoners held by the US after being drugged to destroy his memory, which would include those of her. She disposes of the agent sent to keep an eye on her, and steals an aircraft, and the two of them escape back to the US. ==Cast==

• John Wayne as Col. Jim Shannon • Janet Leigh as Lt. Anna Marladovna Shannon / Capt. Olga Orlief • Jay C. Flippen as Maj. Gen. Black • Paul Fix as Maj. Rexford • Richard Rober as FBI Agent George Rivers • Roland Winters as Col. Sokolov • Hans Conried as Col. Matoff • Ivan Triesault as Gen. Dmitri Langrad ==Production==

Hughes intended to make a "jet-age" ''Hell's Angels'' to the extent that the flying scenes were the most important element, and led to his obsessive re-editing that stretched into years. The lead actors fretted that the screenplay was "silly", with Wayne only taking on the role because he thought it would make a political statement, but soon realized it would become "one of the worst films" he would ever make. Wayne would later recall, "The final budget was something like four million. It was just too stupid for words." Location filming took place primarily at Edwards Air Force Base and Hamilton Air Force Base, California, with full cooperation from the United States Air Force. Much of the filming of flying scenes was done at Edwards using a North American B-45 Tornado bomber as a camera aircraft. Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, was assigned by the U.S. Air Force to fly for the film. Yeager would fly in the X-1, staged for the film cameras, on May 20, 1950. Another senior jet pilot who flew in the movie was USAF Major Charles Rayburn Cunningham. He and another senior jet pilot, USAF Ret Lt. Col Glen M. "Johnny" Johnson, flew for John Wayne and Janet Leigh. The F-86A Sabre jets depicted in the early sequences were actual operational aircraft of the 94th Fighter Squadron, the first unit so equipped in the USAF, shortly after their conversion to the type in 1949. Yeager would also fly the F-86A in a series of aerobatic maneuvers, under the direction of "air boss" Paul Mantz who coordinated the aerial sequences. Location filming for the Soviet air base was done at George Air Force Base, a World War II air base with many of its wartime structures still intact, giving the base a primitive appearance. The 94th FS and its parent 1st Fighter Group were actually based at George during filming, and had just finished a deployment to Ladd Air Force Base, Alaska, as depicted in the storyline. The "Soviet parasite fighter" that Shannon flies is actually a Bell X-1, the first supersonic aircraft design in the world. The "Yak-12" at the film's beginning is a black-painted Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star. The "mother ship" for the Soviet parasite fighter is actually a Boeing B-50, a development of the B-29. ; The black fighter that appears near the finale, taxiing on the parking ramp and behind the "mother ship" is a Northrop F-89 Scorpion. An F-86 Sabre is used to depict a Russian chase aircraft, painted in dark colors, high visibility orange, and gray juxtaposed to obscure its actual silhouette. The unpainted fighter that Olga is to test fly is also a Northrop F-89 Scorpion. John Wayne's character and other characters wear both the original Army Air Forces uniform and the newer USAF blue uniform. ==Reception==

Critical response Despite the obvious similarities to other successful films, including Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), Comrade X (1940), as well as the more recent dud, The Iron Petticoat (1956), by the time Jet Pilot hit the screens, it looked dated and received universally poor reviews. For aviation fans, even the aerial scenes were greatly reduced, as much of the principal photography had taken place early in 1950, making Jet Pilot something of a historical curiosity. Movie historian Andrew Sarris, writing for the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Josef von Sternberg film retrospective, expressed a more favourable opinion of the film than Crowther. Categorizing Jet Pilot as a stealth comedy, Sarris praises its "humor and sensuality" as "enduringly enjoyable" despite a poor reputation among critics. He said that Sternberg "reduces the Cold War to an animated cartoon" and anticipates a number of metaphors that would appear in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Jet Pilot includes an inflight refueling sequence between aircraft flown by a Russian jet pilot (Janet Leigh) and an American pilot (John Wayne) that makes Kubrick's sequence look tame. The fighter jets become interchangeable with the characters, a comic anthropomorphism where "the planes enjoy a more active sex life than the human beings". Sarris considered Wayne and Leigh to be miscast in a Sternberg film, arguing that they were more at home in the "Ford galaxy" or the "Hitchcock universe", respectively. He concluded that however "meaningless" the film, Sternberg's Jet Pilot "soars in an ecstatic flight of speed, grace and color" and, all said, is a "highly entertaining" work. ==See also==