Jet Pilot — Jet Pilot(Blu Ray)

Here UK-based label PowerHouse/Indicator has released a limited edition Blu-ray (3,000 copies) of the great director Josef von Sternberg’s late and only colour film, ‘Jet Pilot’ (1957).

‘Jet Pilot’ was one of the forays into film production by quixotic mogul Howard Hughes.  It combines two of his great passions, movie making and aviation.  ‘Jet Pilot’ is notorious for its incredibly protracted production period which began shortly after Hughes’ acquisition in 1948 of the struggling major studio, RKO, which produced it, to beyond the sale of the studio in 1955, a decision forced on him by shareholders dissatisfied with his capricious and wrongheaded management.  Sternberg’s contribution, the principal photography of the dramatic characters was complete by 1951 but Hughes’ obsessive tinkering with the aerial footage meant that the film only saw release in 1957.  Bar an enthusiastic endorsement by Sternberg’s biographer Andrew Sarris it has never enjoyed a positive critical reputation.
The film revolves around the relationship between Soviet aviatrix Lieutenant Anna Marladovna (Janet Leigh) and USAF Colonel Jim Shannon (John Wayne) while they both spy on each other for their respective governments.  Eventually they bury the hatchet, marry and settle down in California. 
As a genre piece it clearly belongs to a group of films modeled on Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1939 comedy with Greta Garbo, ‘Ninotchka’.  In these a fierce but glamorous Soviet female ideologue is won over to capitalism by a debonair Western male.  ‘Jet Pilot’ combines this plot with actual case histories of Soviet pilots defecting to the West.  The film has frequently been described as a ‘cold war comedy’ and this is important, it establishes the context it was made in and also elucidates its redeeming qualities.  
In 1950 while Sternberg was involved with principal photography of ‘Jet Pilot’ Senator Joseph McCarthy asserted that the US State Department had been infiltrated by members of the Communist Party.  This led to an escalation of an already paranoid climate.  Although the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations would sabotage the careers of hundreds of film industry workers, Hollywood’s reaction was to exploit and increase the hysteria.  Typical ‘red bait’ movies of the early 1950s included ‘I Was a Communist for the FBI’ and the Wayne starrer ‘Big Jim McLain’ in which red-blooded Americans infiltrate godless Commie cells intent on undermining US society by fomenting industrial unrest.  In this context it is pleasant to encounter a film as balanced and even-handed as ‘Jet Pilot’.  When the protagonists visit Siberia Soviet society is depicted as dystopian (and why not, Stalin was still in charge) but the Russian citizens are portrayed as nothing other than human.

As a comedy ‘Jet Pilot’ works well.  The film’s greatest asset is its frothy script by the talented Jules Furthman.  The screenwriter had helped sparks fly between Bogart and Bacall in Howard Hawks’ ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘The Big Sleep’ and here Wayne and Leigh rise to the occasion and enjoy decent chemistry together.

Howard Hughes was as staunch an anti-leftist as John Wayne.  However ‘Jet Pilot’’s status as a comedy and perhaps because he trusted Furthman after their successful collaboration on the Jane Russell comedy ‘The Outlaw’ (1943) meant he was relatively hands-off with regard to Furthman and Sternberg’s approach.  ‘Jet Pilot’ remains underrated, perhaps because of its anti-communist status during the Red Scare and also because it had no hope of reaching the sublime heights of Sternberg’s marvellous Paramount-produced melodramas with Marlene Dietrich, some of which were written by Furthman or the writer’s other classic scripts for Howard Hawks.  However the film is sensual, sharp and never less than droll.

Indicator’s presentation of the film is in two versions, in the shooting ratio (1.37.1) and the release ratio (1.85.1) which show off cinematographer Winton C Hoch’s three strip Technicolour to its best advantage in a new restored High-Definition print.  There are several extras on the single disk; a textless version of the film’s opening aerial photography, the theatrical trailer and an image gallery.  The most interesting extras are ‘The Town’ a war effort propaganda short from 1943 directed by Sternberg and especially an engaging in-depth discussion of ‘Jet Pilot’ from film historian Tony Rayns which will be invaluable for viewers new to the film and its historical context.