The Iron Petticoat (1956) on Netflix
Captain Vinka Kovalenko lands a Soviet jet in West Germany, saying she is not defecting, only upset over a private matter at home. Captain Chuck Lockwood is ordered to win her over.
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Plot summary
A Soviet Air Force jet sets down in West Germany with Vinka Kovalenko at the controls, and American forces take her prisoner. She tells them she is not defecting and is on no mission; a personal grievance at home lies behind the flight, she says, and it is discrimination against her as a woman. Colonel Tarbell cancels Captain Chuck Lockwood's furlough to London, where his wealthy fiancée Connie waits, and orders him to persuade Vinka to stay in the West, with a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus check for her if he succeeds. Vinka argues the case for communism just as hard. She keeps turning down the engineer Ivan, her admirer. She goes with Chuck to London so he can visit Connie, and the two of them take rooms next to each other in a hotel.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Iron Petticoat (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ben Hecht told journalist Mike Wallace in 1958 that the film was written for Katharine Hepburn but ended up a role for Bob Hope, that Hepburn was "removed from it by fifty percent", and that he got irritated and took his name off it.
- Bob Hope told producer Betty Box and director Ralph Thomas he wanted to pull out of the film, saying he was unhappy with the script. Hepburn and Hecht agreed to make changes to keep him, Hope turned the script over to his own gag writers, many of Hepburn's best scenes were cut, and the title was changed from Not for Money.
- Hepburn privately called Bob Hope "the biggest egomaniac with whom I have ever worked in my entire life" and saw the film as "a cheap vaudeville act" in which she appeared as the stooge.
- After its first release, The Iron Petticoat had only two public screenings in the US, at the Museum of Modern Art and the American Film Institute, and was withheld from US television and home video for years, apparently because Hope was unhappy about the controversy with Hecht.
- According to producer Betty Box, Katharine Hepburn originally wanted Cary Grant, William Holden or James Stewart as her male lead in The Iron Petticoat, but casting the role proved difficult.
- According to his biographer, Bob Hope also took the part to escape the United States while a scandal was tarnishing his reputation as a family man, after a tell-all book by former lover Barbara Payton.
- Only a minimal number of aircraft appeared, with a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak standing in for the MiG-15, the staple of 1950s Soviet air forces; red-star markings on the F-84F and a C-47 turned them into Soviet lookalikes.
