Island in the Sky/The High and the Mighty

I close my retrospective of William Wellman pictures by discussing two he made with John Wayne in the 1950s: Island in the Sky, from 1953, and The High and the Mighty, from 1954. Both, unsurprisingly, concern the hard work and loyalty of airline pilots, and both were adapted from novels by pilot/author Ernest K. Gann (who also wrote the screenplays). Wayne and Wellman made three pictures together in the decade, and they were produced by Wayne's production company (he was one of the first stars to produce his own films).

Island in the Sky concerns civilian pilots flying Army Transport during World War II. Wayne is one such pilot, and he and his crew are flying across the uncharted Labrador coast in Canada. Their wings become encumbered in ice and they are forced to land on a frozen lake, but they have no idea where they are, and their communication is spotty. They will need to be rescued before they run out of food or freeze to death.

Their fellow pilots organize a rescue party, and the action cuts back between Wayne and his men battling nature while their buddies tirelessly look for them. The rescue pilots are played most significantly by Lloyd Nolan, James Arness, and Andy Devine.

This is an effective, low-key picture that is really only focused on the action at hand. There is no greater statement being made, just that these guys are close comrades and tough as nails. The black and white photography was notable for some spectacular aerial photography, shot by William H. Clothier, who was one of the photographers on Wellman's seminal aviation picture, Wings.

The High and the Mighty is a much bigger affair, and is the prototype for the genre that came to be known as the disaster picture. Wayne plays the co-pilot, a man who was involved in a crash that killed his wife and son. The pilot is Robert Stack, a cocky young man who harbors secret fears. They are the crew on a typical Honolulu to San Francisco run, and as the film begins we are introduced to the passengers, a collection of types--newlyweds, a narcissistic theater producer, a gregarious midwestern couple, a docile Korean woman, a playboy industrialist and the cuckolded husband who wants to kill him, and an aging woman with a past who is flying to meet her new husband, whom she met as a pen pal.

Some of this stuff is horribly quaint, and when you're watching it you'll know it's from a different era, just by all the smoking that goes in (even in the cockpit). It kind of takes you back to see a man get on a plane with a gun in his pocket.

Anyway, the plane loses an engine and the crew struggles to bring the plane in before it runs out of fuel. A lot of this has been done to death in the years since, specifically the Airport pictures and the spoof Airplane! (which Stack himself appeared in). Though this film, which was shot in Cinemascope, is bloated and corny, there's some real suspense to it, even though we can be sure how will it turn out. The film was a huge hit.

Wellman made a few more pictures after this, but grew disenchanted with the changes that had happened in Hollywood, and retired after making Lafayette Escadrille, another aviation picture, in 1959. He died in 1975, but his legacy is kept alive by his son William Jr. (who participates in many commentaries on his father's films). Wellman, like Howard Hawks, was a great filmmaker who had so little of a signature that though he made many famous films, is largely forgotten today, which is a shame.