Island in the Sky

This proved to be an unjustly neglected gem, especially in view of the overrated THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954) – which I watched in conjunction with it – from the same team. As with John Wayne's other Batjac productions, the film hasn't been seen in decades but, hopefully, it will be rediscovered now via Paramount's SE DVD.

It features one of Wayne's more interesting roles, and his performance is accordingly impressive. Director Wellman and Wayne (in his capacity as executive producer) managed to make a low-key and unusually realistic film, which celebrates camaraderie, amid the studio system – with very little concession to typical Hollywood trappings (unlike its glamorized and inflated follow-up!). Ernest K. Gann, who spent his life in aviation and who followed this with THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, for the first time adapted his own novel to the screen and this gave the script a definite ring of authenticity: consequently, we find here any number of wonderful human (and often humorous) vignettes – but especially poignant are Sean McClory's death scene and the finale where the downed airmen are, at long last, spotted by their comrades who form the search party. Besides, the black-and-white cinematography (by Archie Stout and William H. Clothier, both of whom shot many a John Wayne picture) is remarkable and, done with little or no special effects, was – by all accounts – seminal in its field. The cast, too, is peppered with familiar faces (either established – and reliable – character actors or upcoming stars) but, more importantly, solid performers all around.

Wellman, a flying aficionado as well, made 11 films on the subject and numbers this one among his favorites (I tend to agree with him, given that I was slightly let down by some of his more renowned work like BEAU GESTE [1939], BATTLEGROUND [1949] and THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY itself!). The director's long career in films, tackling all kinds of subjects, was undoubtedly an interesting one: though he never quite achieved the reputation of, say, John Ford or Howard Hawks, he was of the same breed (and, indeed, this particular film has the feel of these two giants' work – both of whom, obviously, also proved crucial to John Wayne's career – and especially Hawks' CEILING ZERO [1935] and ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS [1939], with which ISLAND IN THE SKY shares some of its plot line).

Free at last. AMC Channel is showing Island in the Sky & The High and the Mighty the weekend of July 16 & 17. Get your recording equipment ready. I have been waiting almost fifty years to see this movie again. I think it was the first time I ever saw John Wayne in a movie. I was about 13. As the hero he was bigger than life to me at the time. He never gave up even if the situation looked hopeless. As I grew older and thought of the movie at times I was even more impressed with his actions. I hope now that the Wayne family has released it to TV they will also release it with a new set of DVDs. I have checked this web site often to see if there were any new info on the release or showing of this movie.

All I can say is the Wayne family estate is really making the Duke's fans salivate over seeing this film and The High and the Mighty. Island in the Sky came first and a lot of the same people have credits on this and The High and the Mighty. William Wellman directed both, both from novels by Ernest K. Gann, and William Clothier photographed the aerial sequences in both.

The only criticism I have of Island in the Sky is that I wish it had been done in color. Those bleak vistas of the tundra where Wayne and his crew are stranded would have really been outstanding in color.

John Wayne and his crew have to make a forced landing in the bleak tundra of very northern Quebec and they have to hope to be rescued before to long. It's either freezing or starvation, not a pleasant choice. The Duke is a civilian pilot contracted to the army to fly supplies.

When word of the fact he's down gets out his fellow civilian pilot contractors drop whatever they're doing to search for Wayne. The rest of the film is the story of that search and as the action shifts back and forth from the search to the men on the ground, the suspense never lets up. Wayne gives one of his outstanding performances as the pilot in charge who has to hold his crew together until rescue comes. Some closeup shots reveal his torment, but the men must never see it. This is a different John Wayne, battling the elements instead of bad guys.

He gets great support from a great cast of players. I'd like to single out Lloyd Nolan and Sean McClory in particular. Lloyd Nolan is one of the other pilots searching and he has a terrific scene on the telephone with the wife of one of Wayne's crew, trying to comfort her and give her hope and hopefully psyche himself up. It's beautifully played.

Sean McClory is one of Wayne's crew on the ground and I won't tell you his scene, but it is unforgettable and haunting.

Of course the credit here also goes to director William Wellman. Wellman before he became a director was a real adventuring character in his youth which included a stint in the Lafayette Escadrille. He developed a life long love of aviation and a lot of his films have an aviation background and theme.

One other thing that's probably reason enough to get this film if it comes out. Andy Devine is another of the pilots searching for Wayne. A call is placed to his home and his wife in turn relays it to Andy who is at a public pool with his two kids. He takes the call and then says we have to leave, but one more race to the other side of the pool. He tosses the kids in and then does a great belly flop dive in the pool himself.

Andy was a big fat man. God only knows where they got a bathing suit to fit him. But he's quite a sight doing that dive and in a bathing suit.

If it is ever shown on TV catch it if at all possible.

I'll admit I wasn't expecting much here - I'd seen the tail-end of the movie a while back, and it didn't look too hot, but I'm a wannabe John Wayne completest, so I took it upon myself to watch this 1953 effort as an outward and visible sign of my devotion.

It's a stunning film, for those who appreciate such things. The Duke plays against type to a degree here. He's a WWII-era transport pilot in this one whose plane goes off-course and crashes in an uncharted region of Labrador in -70F (-56C) temperatures. He's not exactly a hopeless neurotic - this is John Wayne, after all - but you can see his confidence falter as it becomes increasingly likely that he and his men aren't going to make it out alive. This is paralleled by the story of the search pilots, whose confidence also wanes as they poke around the confusing landscape trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Great performances on that side of the story, too, most notably by Andy Devine of all people - the veteran John Wayne fan keeps waiting for the comic relief from this fine character actor, and its absence adds to the overall tension. The juxtaposition of the two stories underscores the importance of friendship, devotion, courage, cooperation, and creativity. For the history-minded among you, it is also piques one's interest in radio and aviation technology of the WWII period - in ways the Duke's "fighter jock" movies like "The Flying Tigers" and "Flying Leathernecks" really do not. This is a remarkable film, well written in Hemmingwayesque sparse, masculine prose and effectively photographed in stark black and white. Highly recommended, especially for the odd duck who still believes that John Wayne couldn't act. 8/10

"Island in the Sky" has long vanished from television station inventories: I last saw this movie in, best guess, 1960. But I've never forgotten it, & two years ago I tracked down the knuckle-biter Ernest K. Gann novel on which the film is strongly based.

When a transport plane goes down in the white-blindness of sub-arctic Labrador its crew is in dire straits: howling winds, icy weather, almost no food, and no shelter or heat source. Fellow pilots & aircrews organize an air search, but the Labrador landscape they search is vast, monotonous & unforgiving of downed airmen: the searching crews know they're in a race against time, that the odds against their downed mates' survival decrease with every tick of the clock. The film sublimely depicts the searchers long hours of tedium in their inadequately heated Douglas C-47 flight decks, all the while with their hope for sighting their downed comrades dimming. They battle the ice-fog, the weather fronts, the monotonous vastness of the landscape, the limits of their aircraft and radios and compasses, and the human limits of their flying and navigational skills and their powerful fatigue. Yet nobody will give up the search: each of the rescue crews knows that they themselves might, at nature's or a fouled sparkplug's whim, have been the men crash-landed in the frigid wasteland beneath their wings.

We also see the plight of the downed aircrew scrabbling in their plane's wreck for morsels of food, shelter, clothing, and with their frozen fingers struggling to whirl the crank of a "Gibson Girl" emergency radio transmitter of dubious value. We feel their growing, chilling despair: after all, they're veteran airmen who know the odds against a search crew sighting their snow-covered wreck in this sub-arctic expanse where, from the air, every lake, hummock, snowfield, depression, hill and endless sweep of terrain looks alike. They know their would-be rescuers are flying over uncharted space, without a single reliable reference point; and they know that magnetic compasses (long before GPS satellite navigation came on the scene)in the Labrador region are subject to grievously false readings - they know the searchers could well be flying the same search routes over and over again without even realizing it: and the search crews know it too. And because there are no distinguishable landmarks, and because compasses are untrustworthy, the shivering men know that even if they are sighted it's likely that a rescue plane at the limit of its fuel could well be unable to relay accurate headings or recognizable landmarks to the crew of a follow-up aircraft.

The script neatly follows Gann's novel & its spirit: man and his pitifully inadequate, yet much-ballyhooed technology pitted against nature, against what has been called "the benign indifference of the universe". Gann was a veteran transport pilot whose novels, and this one is no exception, convey the grim obstacles airmen faced in aviation's primitive days. Gann's characters aren't heroes: they're just guys who happen to operate equipment which, like the men themselves, has finite limitations in the face of remorseless nature. Like the novel's, the film's dialogue is terse, the casting superb: you can imagine each actor being the man Gann wrote about in his novel. "Island in the Sky" is a no-frills film: no special effects worth mentioning, and none are necessary. You get to be on the frozen earth in the middle of nowhere, and on the flight deck with the weary, half-snowblind, anxious search crews. You feel the fear, the anxiety, the pressure, the cold, the crews' frustration with the limits of their technology and abilities.

I'd love to see "Island in the Sky" come out on DVD: a solid, bare-bones, no glamor, no mercy story well told.