THUNDER IN THE CINEMA
IN THE MID- TO LATE 1940S THE DRONE AND ROAR OF AIRCRAFT PISTON ENGINES FADED AND WAS REPLACED BY THE HOWL AND SCREAM OF TURBOJETS. HOLLYWOOD, IN ITS NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR CUTTING-EDGE ENTERTAINMENT, SNATCHED AT THE NEW ERA IN AVIATION.
Needle-nosed jets with sweptback wings were an irresistible draw to those raised on space heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Some films that emerged from the postwar dream factories were slapdash affairs, while others were major efforts to depict a world hardly imagined by middle-class American audiences.
Howard Hughes’ costly fiasco Jet Pilot, filmed in the late 1940s, became a laughingstock upon its release in 1957, when the aircraft it featured were hopelessly outdated. But the superb Strategic Air Command of 1955 was as fine a work of the filmmaker’s art as has ever touched the silver screen. In this article we’ll revisit a few old favorites, discover a couple of virtually forgotten films and explore others that deserve more appreciation than they received when they first appeared in theaters.
, released by Warner Bros. in 1950, is the story of former B-17 pilot Matt Brennan (Humphrey Bogart) and hard-nosed millionaire aircraft designer Leland Willis (Raymond Massey) joining forces to test the new Willis JA-3 supersonic jet. Willis hopes to impress the Air Force with a nonstop flight from Nome, Alaska, to Washington, D.C., via the North Pole. Test pilot Carl Troxell (Richard Whorf) wants to design a safer escape pod–equipped version, the JA-4, but Brennan is unconvinced it will work. Brennan successfully flies the JA-3 from Nome to Washington, but learns that Troxell has been killed testing
