Jet Pilot

Jet Pilot (1957)

Exploding with all the power of the jet age... with all the passion of a daring love story!

U.S. Air Force aviator Jim Shannon is tasked with escorting a Soviet pilot claiming -- at the height of the Cold War -- that she wants to defect. After falling in love with and marrying her, Shannon learns from his superiors that she's a spy on a mission to extract military secrets. To save his new wife from prison and deportation, Shannon devises a risky plan.

Date of release
1957-10-11
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (50)
Runtime
1h 52m
Genres
Action, Adventure, Romance
Director
Josef von Sternberg

Casting

Interesting facts

Jet Pilot is a 1957 American Cold War romance film directed by Josef von Sternberg, starring John Wayne and Janet Leigh, and featuring Jay C. Flippen, Paul Fix, and Hans Conried. It was written and produced by Jules Furthman and presented by Howard Hughes.

Production

Hughes intended to make a "jet-age" Hell's Angels, his 1930 pre-Code flying epic, to the extent that the flying scenes were the most important element, and led to his obsessive re-editing that stretched into years. While filming was completed around 1950, he continued to work on it, and it was finally released in 1957, by which time the aircraft shown were obsolete.

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 later recalled, "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 U.S. Air Force (USAF). 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 USAF to fly for the film.

Another senior jet pilot who flew in the movie was USAF Major Charles Rayburn Cunningham. Another senior jet pilot, retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel Glen M. "Johnny" Johnson, and he 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 also flew the F-86A in a series of aerobatic maneuvers, under the direction of "air boss" Paul Mantz, who coordinated the aerial sequences.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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