Strategic Air Command (1955)

Powerful

One of my all time favorites.

A Masterpiece!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Anthony Mann and James Stewart paired up for numerous features in the 1950s, their best work being that in the western genre. STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND is something different, a look at the workings of a bomber command crew during the Cold War. Stewart gives an effortlessly likeable performance as the family man battling with duty at home and at work, while the all-colour production certainly looks nice and aeroplane fans will be delighted by the technology of the era. It's certainly watchable enough for fans of the actor and movies of the era. However, it's all a little too worthy, a little too dull. The drama that evolves is rather predictable in nature and all of the bits with June Allyson merely drag. You can't help but think a WW2-themed movie would have been more satisfying.

I know many reviewers here delve into the aspect of SAC life and the B- 36. My overall take on this film is about sacrifice to keep America safe and individual patriotism. Short and to the point."Jimmy" Stewart was well chosen for the role as he was a high ranking AF officer himself. This is not to mention that he actually flew bombing missions in WWII.

How many miles of celluloid have been exposed in the business of glorifying the men and planes that dropped the bombs that burned the cities? "Too many" is not a flippant answer.Strategic Air Command (1955) is the supreme ideological example of the (for want of a better word) "USAF genre" movie. Washington's defeat in the Korean War thwarted plans to overturn socialism in the USSR and curb anti-colonial struggles via atomic intimidation, and created the stalemate between imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat we have come to call the Cold War. And in the Cold War, so far as Washington and its Madison Avenue and Hollywood drum-beaters were concerned, the newly inaugurated USAF had center stage. The gleaming technology and Triumph of the Will-flavored esprit de corps adumbrated in movies like this created the image of professional and self-sacrificing organization men. It was beside the point that the organization they ran, and still run, is an international murder machine pushing the violent rule of the world's final empire.Strategic Air Command is no sensitive treatment of such "organization" men, the men in the "gray flannel suit." It is, instead, about the satisfaction to be found when men (and their wives) embrace the shipwreck of their lives and careers on the rocks of a necessity called National Security.James Stewart played his finest roles in 1950s-era Hollywood movies. He played them in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. For Hitchcock he played men appalled to learn what transgressions they were capable of justifying and carrying-out. These were the films Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). For Anthony Mann he played rough and ready loners warring against their own egos and larger social necessities in Winchester 73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953).Anthony Mann in the 1950s moved away from tyro kitchen sink crime films like T Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) and into Freudian westerns like The Furies (1950). He finished as a director of historical epics on the scale of nineteenth century French history painting: Cimarron (1960), El Cid (1961), and most grandly The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).Strategic Air Command was manufactured by Paramount Pictures. It espouses "professional military conformity" writ very large. If anyone other than the Pentagon can be identified as the film's "auteur" it is screenwriters Beirne Lay Jr. (1909-1982) and Valentine Davies (1905-1961). Lay in particular, a former officer with the Army Air Corps during World War Two, made a career out of Air Power books and movies. He co-wrote 12 O'clock High (1948), that hymn to "maximum effort" and bureaucratic cold-bloodedness in the service of U.S. plutocracy, and then went to Hollywood to work on the script for the 1949 film of the same name. In 1952 Lay wrote the film Above and Beyond (1952), about the trials and tribulations of another friend of humanity, Colonel Paul Tibbetts. (Lay later wrote that perfect genuflection before the U.S. officer caste, The Gallant Hours (1960), a religious peroration on the career of Admiral Halsey.) In many ways Strategic Air Command is a fictional re-telling of Above and Beyond. The dramatic spine of both movies is the education of a husband and wife in their responsibilities as cogs in the great engine of national war-making. In both, the wives have the worst of it, waiting on the ground and learning to curb their tongues about secrecy and missed dinners. June Allyson seemed to only play these roles in the 1950s. In addition to Strategic Air Command, she played the valiant and saintly help-meet in The Stratton Story (1949), Executive Suite (1954), The Glen Miller Story (1954) (also starring James Stewart and written by Valentine Davies), and The McConnell Story (1955).James Stewart plays professional baseball player and Air Force reservist "Dutch" Holland. Recalled to active duty, his resentment against the USAF for destroying his civilian career is eventually broken by the glamour of the new jet bomber he learns to fly (accompanied by Victor Young's lushly carnal and languorous musical score.) Along the way he meets SAC's supreme commander, General Hawks. Hawks is clearly a fictional avatar of Curtis Le May. Hawks is played by veteran character actor Frank Lovejoy. Lovejoy, now long forgotten, appeared in hundreds of movies, including such Cold War gems as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and Men of the Fighting Lady, a 1954 tribute to naval aviation during the Korean War."It all boils down to less danger of war," Hawks tells Dutch Holland. It all has to do with what we came to call deterrent and mutual-assured-destruction. Eventually the stifling moral cynicism of imperialists like General Hawks would be rejected, but until the Wall Street barons and the state that defends their rule is finally removed from power, the real SAC will thrive.Is Strategic Air Command worth watching? A feminist scholar could certainly make a career, or at least a dissertation, out of the films of June Allyson. A post-modern cultural theorist could find full employment deconstructing the fetishized imagery of strategic bombers sweeping toward gorgeous golden sunsets. (Indeed, Stanley Kubrick has already sent it up in the opening credits of Dr Stangelove.) What can communists get out of Strategic Air Command? Well, communists all love James Stewart movies, and better Strategic Air Command than 1959's The FBI Story. Chew popcorn to avoid grinding teeth, comrades.

OK, so it's not perfect... So, you could guess the "trite" plot, etc...Is that wrong? It seems so many times, "fans" tend to rip apart films, especially "old" films. I find that most members of the younger generations--and some other "experts" (I was born in 64) tend to "rag" on films like this. They tend to compare them to the more "realistic" things that Hollywood is cranking out now. To truly appreciate a film like this, or "Twelve O Clock High", or "The Bridges at Toko-Ri", you must put yourself in the "frame of mind" of those who made the film and those who watched the film AT THAT TIME, and, too, the EVENTS THAT WERE GOING ON. (Too bad most young people spend their time playing video games or watching something as trivial as today's NFL.) Only THEN can you TRULY appreciate what the makers were trying to say. This seems to be a problem with Hollywood now, as they are continuing to remake older films (The Day the Earth Stood Still) because, I guess, the original version is too "trite" and "predictable".WHAT !!!!!!!!!!!!Sorry, got carried away. Yes, this movie has FANTASTIC footage of the B-36 and the B-47, but, it is a fine movie in it's own right. Yes, it IS a bit of a flag-waver, but what else would you expect from the fine people who made this and were in the film. And, you don't need to be a "flag-waver" to enjoy it! I'm not!