Jet Pilot: Hot to Trotsky

An early Cold War romance between U.S. and Russian jet aces never takes flight. Plus, Jim gets canceled over John Wayne!

Oct 31, 2024

Jet Pilot is a mid-air collision involving some of the brightest lights of the 20th century. Start with Howard Hughes, the famously reclusive billionaire, aircraft engineer, and studio boss. Then throw in movie icon John Wayne, actress Janet Leigh, who would go onto fame in Hitchcock’s Psycho, storied director Josef von Sternberg, who helped launch Marlene Dietrich’s career, longtime screenwriter Jules Furthman, who wrote classics such as The Big Sleep, and then for good measure add legendary boundary-pushing pilot Chuck Yeager.

All that talent and the film can’t get off the ground. There’s a reason you’ve likely never heard of it, and why I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere.

I don’t suppose you’d like to check out my cockpit.

It’s a movie no one (except perhaps for Hughes) wanted on their resumes, a dramatically inert tonal mish-mash that reduces the Cold War to a meet-cute. In its own strange way, it was intended to the Top Gun of its time. Producer Hughes, who ran RKO Studios, was determined to show state-of-the-art flying sequences and secured the cooperation of the U.S. Air Force to pull them off. And like Top Gun 30 years hence, the film was intended to celebrate American might and Western values.

But Hughes’ tinkering helped tank the film. Photography began in 1949 but wasn’t finished until 1953, at which point Hughes ordered extensive re-editing. By the time the picture came out in 1957, much of the aircraft in the film, including the F-86 Sabrejet flown by Wayne’s character, was outmoded. (And Leigh was no longer a 22-year-old ingenue.)

Even so, the aerial sequences are the best part of the movie. Yeager, the pilot who broke the sound barrier, was among those recruited to do some stunt flying. The images of the silver-bodied craft swooping against the backdrop of a blue sky evoke romantic notions of the bygone Jet Age. Slipping the surly bonds of Earth indeed.

The premise of the film makes almost zero sense but here goes. (Wayne reportedly had nothing but disdain for the script.) Hotshot Air Force pilot Jim Shannon, on patrol duty in Alaska, watches as his pilots force down a stray MiG that has wandered across the Arctic from Russia. To Shannon’s astonishment, out of the cockpit pops Anna Marladonva (Leigh), a beautiful young Soviet pilot who is looking to defect.

But Anna is a loyal Soviet — she won’t spill secrets. She objects to the transactional (i.e. capitalist) notion that she trade information for her life.

“Your precious freedom,” Anna says in perfect American English (Leigh doesn’t even attempt a Russian accent). “It needs to be bought?”
“Why not?” A general responds. “We paid a high price for it.”

Shannon is ordered to loosen her up, which for some reasons involves a trip to Palm Springs and dinner and dancing. “I’m a jet man, not a gigolo!” Shannon protests in what may have been the worst line Wayne was ever forced to utter. And I am fairly sure we didn’t treat wayward MiG pilots to swanky supper club dinners back in the 50s, but I suppose it beats waterboarding.

Shannon notes how the Soviets and Americans cooperated at the end of World War II but soon became bitter rivals. “I met lots of them in Germany, got drunk with them. I song their songs and they sang mine. It was a beautiful friendship that ripened into complete apathy, baby.”

There you go. As concise a description of the origins of the Cold War as you’re likely to find, with a “baby” for extra emphasis. (Wayne may have been channeling Sinatra at this point.)

Anna is horrified to see come face-to-face with Western luxury. Her hotel suite could house three families in the bedraggled Soviet Union, she laments. But it isn’t long before she’s drinking champagne and trying on swimsuits. Capitalism. Not so bad!

Naturally, the relationship between the two pilots soon turns romantic. “I’m attracted to you in every way but politically,” Shannon tells her in perhaps the second-worst line Wayne ever had to utter. She think love is a “dangerous narcotic” like religion, but the American pilot, he’s is a charmer.

Eventually they discover the thing that unites them is a shared belief in ramped-up military spending. “What’s the point of building more houses if somebody’s going to blow them off the map?” Wayne says. It’s passion by way of Lockheed Martin.

The movie then takes an even more bizarre turn when Wayne accompanies Leigh back to impoverished Russia, which looks like a holdover from the Broadway production of Rent with some extra goats and cows added to the cast.

I won’t spoil the ending but let’s say Anna’s loyalties are tested. And when you have a movie featuring pilots, there is really only place where the film can reach its climax — in the sky. And honestly, by that point, that was the only climax I was looking for.

Jet Pilot has its charms — it’s an effective window into American psyche in the early days of the Cold War when the country viewed the Soviet Union as an almost unknowable foe, an industrial juggernaut dedicated to the overthrow of the West. But the film is far too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

Leigh (the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis, of course) was good in almost everything she did. She worked with some top-notch directors in her career beyond Hitchcock, including Fred Zinnemann (Act of Violence), Budd Boetticher (The Naked Spur), John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) and Orson Welles (Touch of Evil).

And there’s John Wayne, who’s, well, just fine and plays his character in good humor as if he knows the script is a dog but he’s not going to get too worked up about it. That was the thing about studio pictures back then; it was always on to the next one.

Wayne was just fine in most of his many, many films (he made nearly 250, more than 50 before he became a star) and in some he was something.a good deal more than that. Like many screen legends, he gets retroactive grief for playing “John Wayne” over and over again. But he at times added deep shadings to his characters, most famously in John Ford’s The Searchers, when a quest to recover a kidnapped child drives him to brink of madness.

My personal favorite is his somber performance in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which is just a spectacular and gorgeous film all around. But he was also terrific as the embittered trail boss in Red River, the boxer searching for some peace in Ireland in The Quiet Man, the father-figure sheriff in Rio Bravo, the drunken, one-eyed gunslinger in True Grit, and the fearsome but tender-hearted cowboy in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Wayne could be tough, yes, but he could also play desperate, vulnerable, even weak.

Since his death, Wayne has been reduced to a caricature, largely because of his conservative politics and his support of the Vietnam War. Yes, he was sometimes more of a persona than a person, but he was one of the great stars that Hollywood ever produced. He worked hard and almost always delivered. He took his share of risks. You knew what you were getting with a John Wayne picture, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

In fact, when this presidential election is over, if it ever is, I may plunk down with a giant bowl of popcorn and watch as many Wayne films as a I can in a weekend. Sometimes you just need something you can count on.

Nuclear Theater

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