Nobody likes Howard Hughes’ Jet Pilot (1957). One of the stars of Jet Pilot, John Wayne, has described the film as “too stupid for words”. Hughes poured a fortune into making Jet Pilot, financing a shoot that lasted from 1949 until 1953. Though Josef von Sternberg directed all of the dramatic scenes shot on sound stages, a myriad of other directors (such as Byron Haskin and Philip Cochran) took on the aerial and special effects sequences at Hughes’ behest. There was all of this attention paid to the technical details of the planes that Hughes never really bothered much with Jules Furthman’s inane script.
But I disagree with the critical assessment that Jet Pilot is “one of the worst movies”. I believe that Andrew Sarris was right when he called Jet Pilot a “stealth comedy”. It’s as if Josef von Sternberg studied Furthman’s screenplay and realized that it amounted to a live action Tex Avery cartoon and just leaned into that all of the way. Jet Pilot isn’t pretentious at all. It takes the premise of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) and reimagines it as a fabulously campy satire of American post-war propaganda. In the candy colored world of von Sternberg’s battle of the sexes the Cold War is little more than foreplay as Janet Leigh shows off her legs to besmitten bone-head John Wayne who teasingly calls her “tootsie roll” or “cup cake” and at one point protests to his superior officers in the Air Force “I’m a jet man not a gigolo”.
On further reflection there’s nothing stealthy about von Sternberg’s comedy in Jet Pilot. The scenes between Leigh and Wayne are a natural progression from Dietrich’s scenes with Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. In Jet Pilot an American fighter pilot and a Soviet Agent can sit around a garishly furnished Palm Springs restaurant eating steaks (described by Leigh’s Russian agent as the greatest propaganda in the world) and discussing women’s lingerie. An intersection between Avery and von Sternberg’s aesthetics could not be rendered more literally. The kinkiness that permeates all of von Sternberg’s comedies dominates Jet Pilot. Innuendos, both verbal and visual, are everywhere and executed with the juvenile relish of Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood (1943).
What’s unusual for a Howard Hughes production and common place in a film by von Sternberg is the climactic finish of Jet Pilot. Having lured John Wayne successfully to the Soviet Union, secret agent Janet Leigh discovers that Wayne, if he survives a test flight, will be administered a memory erasing serum. Leigh, realizing that she loves her “jet man” after all, commandeers a jet and sets off to rescue her fella, shooting down Soviet air craft to do so. Women in the cinema of Hughes are objects of desire not the heroines of von Sternberg’s cinema. It’s a testament to von Sternberg’s subtly powerful abilities as a director that he is able to pull off this ending without it feeling tacked-on or unearned.
So do people just hate Jet Pilot because it doesn’t take it’s anti-Soviet stance seriously? Jet Pilot has always been relegated to being the filler title in boxed sets of John Wayne movies. It isn’t Josef von Sternberg’s best film, but it is one of his funniest and a strong late career outing that is definitely worth seeing. However Jet Pilot is one of the Duke’s best non-western flicks that every fan needs to see.
