(Credit: Press / Wikimedia)
Wed 1 January 2025 16:15, UK
Just how golden was the so-called golden age of Hollywood? Although it was this period which ushered in the modern age of film, carving out many of the conventions and techniques which are still used today, nearly 100 years later, it must be said that the period also produced its fair share of terrible movies. Take John Wayne, for instance, the defining action hero of Hollywood’s golden age, starred in a variety of truly iconic western films, but some of his more questionable productions are often forgotten.
After establishing himself as a go-to guy for all things action and western during the 1930s, John Wayne was quickly type-cast as an all-American hero in a wide variety of pictures. Although Wayne himself didn’t seem to have any qualms about this type-casting, and his range as an actor was fairly limited anyway, it did mean that the Iowa-born actor appeared in a wide range of films which were forgettable at their best and laughably bad at their worst.
With the outbreak of World War II during the late 1930s and US involvement in the conflict, which began after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour in 1941, Hollywood was keen to contribute to the nation’s war effort. With many of their leading actors and directors away fighting in Europe, the film industry was relegated to mainly making low-effort propaganda films to boost the spirits and morale of the US population, as well as the troops stationed overseas. Wayne, who had attempted to enlist in the forces himself, starred in a multitude of these propaganda flicks.
Films like Flying Tigers or Reunion in France were not particularly groundbreaking productions, but they remain historically significant artefacts reflecting Hollywood’s role in the war effort during World War II. However technically bad these films were, they still paled in comparison to the deluge of terrible propaganda films Hollywood would go on to produce throughout the Cold War. One such film, entitled Jet Pilotstarred John Wayne, and even he could not defend the bizarrely poor quality of the production.
In the film, Wayne plays a US Air Force colonel, Jim Shannon, who falls in love with a Soviet pilot, Anna Marladovna – played by Janet Leigh. Initially, Shannon takes Marladovna under his wing – pun definitely intended – and the pair eventually fall in love. However, it is revealed that the Soviet pilot is actually a spy relaying information back to the USSR. Eventually, the spy falls pregnant by Shannon, and their love causes the Soviet pilot to abandon her communist motherland and escape back to the West with Shannon.
Unsurprisingly, based on that description, the film is not very good. “That is without doubt one of the worst films I ever made,” Wayne once said of Jet Pilot. “The script was too silly to get the message across, and to make things worse, the director Josef von Sternberg insisted on making us rehearse over and over, and he kept making remarks which I didn’t take kindly to. I’d take them from Pappy but not from him. I was ready to punch the son of a bitch in the mouth, but Janet kept calming me down.”
The film was the last to be made by Howard Hughes, who was an aircraft pilot himself. “As for Hughes, he was obsessed with filming hours and hours of jets flying, and he spent the next eight years doing that,” Wayne recalled. “That’s why the film didn’t get a release until 1957. The final budget was something like $4million. It was just too stupid for words.”
Aside from the terrible script, strange plot premise, and poor direction, Jet Pilot also fell victim to the rapid advancement in film technology between the 1940s and 1950s. By the time the film premiered in 1957, almost a decade after it began shooting in 1949, the project already looked incredibly outdated. To call Jet Pilot a flop would be an understatement, and even John Wayne could not salvage the wreckage.
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