Tad Pole
. . . to transport four tons of fuel over Mount Everest to the Pacific Front during World War Two, narrators detail during FLYING FOR UNCLE SAM, a background piece on the ISLAND IN THE SKY disc. Since the whole world hated Hitler, the Nazis, and their Axis Hench Armies, 21st Century People have to wonder exactly WHY it took almost SIX YEARS to eradicate this hateful bunch. I think a lot of this delay has to do with the inefficient planning of the Air Transport Command (ATC). How many loads of gasoline do cargo planes deliver nowadays? Not very many, because pipelines, ships, and local oil wells all are much more efficient means of delivery. If enemy submarines threaten shipping, you can use escort destroyers and torpedo planes to establish safe corridors for tankers with far greater capacity and efficiency than a fleet of ATC planes. Better yet, just expand the flexible Trans-Oceanic phone cable tubes to pipe petroleum products to one's advance bases. Or send Army Rangers to siphon what you need from the Evil Doers' fuel dumps. If all else fails, let some Navy SEALS protect a platoon of Fighting Seabees as they set up working oil rigs near the front lines (or just drill as you go along "island hopping"). It would seem that Big Oil was running the Allies' WWII Campaigns with an eye toward wasting as much fuel as possible.
fung0
I can't imagine why this film is not more widely known, or more highly valued. I finally caught up with it a couple of years ago on DVD, and was absolutely blown away. This is not only one of the Duke's best performances, it's a tense, entertaining film of rather eerie beauty.The basics seem familiar enough. A transport plane has to put down in the snowy wilds of Northern Quebec. We follow both the desperate search efforts, and the hopeless fight for survival of the frostbitten crew. Wayne is anything but his usual sterling self: irrational, angry, frustrated. The other parts are filled very effectively by square-jawed regulars, including James Arness, Lloyd Nolan and Andy Devine.But the real star is the sense of silent, snowy isolation. The title says it all: this film really makes you feel lost on a frozen island surrounded by empty, barren sky. It makes you feel the sense of hopelessness, knowing just how tiny the odds are of being found. And it does this in a subtle, understated way, almost like a film noir, without the pat melodramatics of the following year's The High and the Mighty. This film shows tough, experienced airmen behaving just about as you'd expect, while keeping the real focus on the detail of the rescue flights. Because, above all, Island in the Sky is a film about flying and fliers.Director William Wellman probably deserves the lion's share of the credit. He's not exactly a household name any more, but he was one of the most reliable directors in Hollywood. There's no Wellman signature style, as such - but films like Yellow Sky, Across the Wide Missouri, The Ox-Bow Incident, even the silent Wings, all bear a similar feeling of solidity, of efficient storytelling in the best Hollywood manner.It's amazing to read some of the derogatory reviews that have been posted. As a sometime pilot myself, I find the film more than credible enough. Sure, it rounds off some of the corners, but then it's an early-1950s Hollywood entertainment, not a 21st Century documentary, and works perfectly on its own level. (Far, FAR better than The High and the Mighty, which is resolved by the copilot encouraging the pilot to do something idiotically dangerous, for which in real life they would both surely have been grounded, IF they survived, which they probably wouldn't.)Equally surprising are some of the complaints about continuity. This film uses real aircraft, and must have been an enormous logistical challenge for Wayne's production company. No, it's not absolutely seamless by the standards of today's $200 million productions. But it is internally consistent and beautifully evocative, which should be more than enough for anyone.Island in the Sky is gripping, thought-provoking and kind of mystical, in its own unique way. It reminds me of the films of Val Lewton - a Hollywood 'formula' entry that manages to soar unforgettably beyond the limitations its genre.
JoeytheBrit
This is a typically adequate John Wayne mid-50s, mid-career action film which will probably last in the memory for just two reasons: a haunting death scene in the snowy wastelands of Canada, and the sight of Andy Devine in swimming trunks. Thankfully, Speedos weren't around in 1953, but it's still certainly a sight to see.John Wayne plays Captain Dooley, pilot of a transport plane who is forced to land in the vast snowy tundra. To make matters worse, the plane's battery is quickly fading, and bad weather is closing in… This kind of plot is such a bulk-standard commodity of 50s Hollywood that it's to the film's credit that it manages top hold the viewer's attention without ever becoming dull. Perhaps the film's biggest drawback is its use of studio sets that look unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the location shots. John Wayne broods and rages against the elements and hides his anxiety from the usual united-nations crew. A young James Arness plays one of the team of pilots searching for Wayne's downed plane and he looks like a kind of John Wayne-lite. Director Wellman, who would work on another Ernest K. Gann story, The High and the Mighty, with Wayne in 1954, manages to manufacture a reasonable level of suspense despite the failure to generate any life-in-peril sense of desperation amongst the stranded crew.
