Trailer
Plot summary
During the Cold War, a Soviet Air Force jet sets down at a United States Air Force base in Alaska. The pilot is a woman, Lieutenant Anna Marladovna, and she asks for asylum but will not disclose military information. The base commander, Colonel Jim Shannon, is assigned to seduce her so that she will talk, and he falls in love with her while carrying out the assignment. Fearing that she could be deported, he marries her without the permission of his superiors.
Cast
- Perdita Chandleras Georgie Rexford
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Jet Pilot (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jet Pilot began filming in 1949 and shot for more than eighteen months, but after the last day of shooting in May 1953 Howard Hughes kept the Technicolor film out of release, tinkering with it until October 1957, by which time he had sold RKO.
- Jet Pilot passed through several uncredited directors after Josef von Sternberg: Philip Cochran, Furthman, Edward Killy, Byron Haskin and Don Siegel all directed scenes (Siegel's were not used), and Howard Hughes directed some himself.
- Much of the flying footage was shot at Edwards using a North American B-45 Tornado bomber as a camera aircraft, and Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, was assigned by the Air Force to fly for the film.
- The Soviet parasite fighter flown by John Wayne's Colonel Shannon is actually a Bell X-1, the first supersonic aircraft in the world.
- The film's Soviet air base was played by George Air Force Base, a World War II base whose many intact wartime structures gave it the primitive appearance the production wanted.
