Load of rubbish!!

Instant Favorite.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I personally disagree with the ones that say that this is bad in the same way as ''The Conqueror''. Sure it's bad, but it more looked a comedy than a war movie.John Wayne plays a US Air Force Colonel that is forced to escort a defecting soviet pilot (Janet Leigh) to Russia, and then all hell breaks loose, and in a funny way. Wayne and Leigh even fall in love, and they share even some nights out. Even when they end in Russia the comedy comes out of nowhere! Paul Fix is the comic relief while Hans Conried did his best with the material he was given.However there was a good thing about this movie (that's why I rated it 7); the nice figther planes and the aerial shots, very ahead of its time (made in 1951, but not released until 1957).

I saw this film in the early 80s when I was in art school. I was transfixed. The flying grabbed me so hard that when I went home that night, I was pretending that my wheezy 1966 VW bug was a jet doing arabesques in the sky, which may have made for some odd looking driving. Maybe this is a film you have to see on a screen rather than on TV, but for me the flying WAS the movie. The rest was just an excuse to hang it together and promote an audience.Perhaps I should add that my dad was a pilot and when I was three, he took me up and did corkscrews and dives and flew upside down and I loved it, I was sworn to secrecy to never tell my mother who had made him quit being a crop duster because I was on the way. No roller-coaster has ever lived up to it and all my flying since then has been conventional. However, I found later from my fellow students that few of them drove home in a normal way that night.

Way back in 1949, Howard Hughes signed Josef von Sternberg to direct a tatty romantic comedy by Jules Furthman about a U.S. Air Force pilot (John Wayne) who falls in love with a Russian aviator (Janet Leigh, would you believe?) and marries the girl. The movie wrapped in May, 1951, but Hughes spent the next six years tinkering with it. Finally, using the process invented by the Tushinsky Brothers, he had the movie converted to SuperScope (an anamorphic 2:1). Released by Universal in 1957, it debuted a few months after "The Iron Petticoat", an equally inept Cold War comedy in which Katherine Hepburn played the Russian aviator, and Bob Hope the helpful American. Although "Jet Pilot" is a movie that does absolutely no credit to any of the people involved, either on screen or off, it's nonetheless an entertainingly gosh-awful foray into the comic strip fantasy land which Hughes obviously believed was the terrain of the United States Air Force. Wayne plays with an understandably puzzled frown, while Miss Leigh kicks up her heels as the silk petticoat.

This whole story line is preposterous, The very idea that a defecting Soviet pilot would be flying our very latest fighter after just a few days after coming over is ridiculous. It wouldn't happen in a 100 years. In the 50s when this was filmed was the height of the cold war and our military people were paranoid about our military hardware. Aside from security issues it takes years before our own trainees crawl into a jet cockpit and remember this was the 50s.....America did not have female combat pilots till about 30 years later. The Air Force would never just take someones word that they were A qualified pilot. This movie is not hard to watch. Its photographed well. You just have to take the ultra fantasy story line with a grain of salt.