User Reviews

Do you like a film with a good, solid plot? Well, then look elsewhere. This film is not about plot...at all. This film was designed to highlight the Strategic Air Command.

There's a very loose story to hold the film together -- Jimmy Stewart plays a WWII era soldier who has become a baseball, only to be called back into the service to help get the SAC off the ground. His wife -- June Allyson -- has varying feelings about the call-back, but she is generally supportive of her husband. Eventually, an injury sidelines Stewart's character. That's about it.

Lest you think there's nothing particularly impressive about this film, the flight sequences -- real flight sequences -- a stunningly photographed. In fact, that may be the best thing about the film! For a film with little plot, it has a very strong cast. Jimmy Stewart does a very nice job as a flier who is none to happy to be called back to service, but then gets wrapped up in the mission. June Allyson is bubbly June Allyson...type casting...although she has one dandy scene telling off a general! Frank Lovejoy is strong as the general; Lovejoy is little remembered, but was quite a good actor in his day. Barry Sullivan is along in a rather bland role. Jay C. Flippen and Harry Morgan -- too fine character actors -- are along and do nicely.

Aside from the aerial photography, two things impressed me. First, you get a good look at the inside of some of the planes. Second, Stewart really was a military pilot, so it's interesting to see him in this role.

Nevertheless, nothing makes up for a lack of plot, so I give this film a "6". If you have some special reason to watch a film on the topic, then you might enjoy it -- I did, my father was in the Strategic Air Command (albeit as a sergeant in the food service wing, but he was very proud of his service there).

Interesting story of Dutch Holland (James Stewart) and his wife (June Allyson) and their involvement with the Strategic Air Command of the U.S. Air Force in the post-war years. Holland, an ex bomber pilot, is now a successful third baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and has just signed a contract for seventy thousand bucks. His career is interrupted when the Air Force activates his reserve status and he's hauled back in for 21 months. Holland has a lot of catching up to do but learns to love flying the huge B-36 and then the slim B-47. He's a good officer and reenlists, which perturbs his wife, but a bad shoulder forces him out of the Air Force and, presumably, he goes back to baseball as a coach or manager.

The movie is practically a recruitment film for the Strategic Air Command, promoting self sacrifice for the sake of a nation on the brink of war. The incidents we witness are familiar from earlier war movies. All that's missing is the war itself.

June Allyson plays June Allyson, the steadfast, common-sense wife, who endorses Stewart's first hitch but balks at the second. Some sit-com humor is gotten out of their adjustment to military life. They move from a prosperous-looking home into a standard typical spare functional monochromatic generic Monopoly Air Force house. The re-introduction to military routine is played for some sarcasm too. Stewart has gone for a medical check up but he's late. "Well, honey, they go over you from head to foot here, and they've only gotten down to my throat." There is the requisite cigar-chomping tough general, modeled after the brave but reckless Curtis LeMay who ran SAC at the time. The tedium of being checked out on various airplanes is omitted. And there is a soaring score by Victor Young that almost adds lift to the wings of those stone-heavy B-36s.

Interesting airplanes, B-36s. The largest combat airplane ever produced. As in a training film, the story guides us through the vast interior of this machine, crowing a bit over the 80-foot-long "Holland Tunnel" that connects the fore and aft compartments. The thing was a dinosaur, of course, designed during WWII to deliver bombs from the US to Germany in case Britain fell, slow, ungainly and obsolescent almost from the beginning. The B-47 represented a new paradigm -- twice as fast and with a crew of only three men. And the B-36s replacement, the B-52, has had a service life of half a century. There are also a few proud shots of Globemaster transports, huge things, seen swallowing an 18-wheeler whole from its open maw, like a python swallowing a shoat. It seems impossible.

Gorgeous shots of airplanes in flight. (In fact, the photography, by seasoned pro William H. Daniels, is superb.) Seeing this spacious bomber fly from Texas to Alaska and back without refueling generates a desire to be aboard. There's even a built-in coffee station. Maybe glazed donuts with sprinkles.

I've seen it twice and enjoyed it both times despite the stereotypical script. The airplanes make the rest of it worthwhile.

I had read much about this movie, many good things about the air to air sequences and the feeling of "being there" and the shots of the B36 and the B47 are real, and totally convincing, however the other side of the story, that is to say the relationship between Stewart and his wife (June Allyson) is, as one reviewer wrote "hokey" - yes, indeed, hokey to the max (IMNSHO). But I guess that not everyone is an airplane nut, and you really have to satisfy everybody, particularly those paying the $$$$$. Looking back and noticing when this masterpiece was made (1955) makes me realize "...of course, one could not expect any thing else!" Nice job, and worthy of all the accolades!

If good intentions made a film great, then this film might be one of the greatest films ever made. The film has great actors, a master director, a significant theme--at least a would-be significant theme, undertone of fifties existential world-weariness, aerial scenes that ought to have thrilled both senses and imagination, and characters about which one might deeply care. It is about patriotism and about patriotism in a healthy way.

Not quite ten years after the film, I knew Air Force officers who taught my R.O.T.C. classes at university. They were intellectuals. They thought deeply about their work. They has senses of humor. One had been a crew member on the first plane to drop a hydrogen bomb. I have wondered if any one of them died in Vietnam. I imagine that they flew missions there.

Regrettably, the film fails. The movie lacks visual interest, drama, expression of feeling, and celebration of the very patriotism that underlines the narrative. No actress has been worse used that June Allison in this movie. Her Susan Holland is a woman that one would flee, not embrace. Col. James Stewart (who as then a colonel) makes a good stab at this role as Lt. Col(and later Col.) Dutch Holland. But the most interesting thing he does in the role is bite into a sandwich. I'm not kidding. Stewart was good as biting in sandwiches as he did in The Spirit of Saint Louis.

One might think of Ted Williams, but I don't when I watch Mr. Steward in the role. I do think of William Holden as Lt. Harry Brubaker in The Bridges at Toko-Ri . The comparison is not good for Mr. Stewart, who seems wasted in this film.

Footage shot from a B-36 looks like outtakes from commercials for an airline. Though beautiful, the aerial shots are mundane. For the time, they might have impressed viewers. The crash in Greenland involves unexciting modeling You expect the outcome to be good.

The undertone--the subtext-- for the film voices the tedium that Air Force flight crews must have felt during their long missions and the banality that the Air Force used to make its business--well business like any other business. One imagines how a La Nouvelle Vague director might explore this theme and then one begins to think about how someone with imagination might have filmed this movie. Little moments are missed.When crews returned from long missions, the members of the crew got a shot of scotch and a massage before debriefing the mission. Showing that might have helped.

Banality was the image the Air Force wanted and Mr. Mann accommodated the brass. Maybe, in that sense, the film works, but not for me.

I mourn when I watch the movie, because I think all of us, director, actors, crew, viewers, and members of the armed services might have enjoyed giving and getting much more than we get here.

I don't think that this movie had to be Dr. Strangelove or 2001, both of which it presages, but it had potential never realized. Yet, I enjoy watching it. I think of the airmen on their long missions and the ground crews in isolated places. There is a certain sense of honor celebrated here and I celebrate that honor.

I certainly understand why people who praise this movie here and other places appreciate it. If there were no intentional fallacy, it would get a 10 from me.

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Strategic Air Command is a much a USAF recruiting film with heavy Cold War patriotism overtones as a major motion picture featuring one of America's top stars.

Jimmy Stewart stars as "Dutch" Holland, star third baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals who is unexpected recalled for USAF duty. Stewart was an Air Force pilot during WW2, but at 46 is unrealistic as an MLB player. That angle is based on baseball great Ted Williams, a WW2 Marine pilot, being recalled for duty during the Korean War. Williams had re-upped for a role that was to be PR only, got recalled by mistake, but went with it as he felt his fans wouldn't forgive him. (How would that go today?)

June Allyson plays his clingy, annoying wife who calls him all over the base, including places that even if she knew he was there wouldn't allow a call - like the pressure chamber. I guess they had chemistry in other films, but here they are still and saccharine.

Holland dutifully joins up for 21 months but is quickly swept up in it all, pushed by a cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay clone. We're hit over the head how critical SAC is, a war without a war. (Cold War) Credit is due for showing how tough SAC was on its crews who are constantly off on long, boring, but dangerous mission. Credit also for showing that several SAC personnel aren't happy with the situation, including a member of Holland's crew who was similarly re-recruited - costing him his business.

The real stars of the movie are the massive, 10-engined B-36 Peacekeeper and the sleek B-47 Stratojet. Much of the film consists of long, adoring shots of these aircraft soaring through the skies. In VistaVision these would have been doubly impressive.

Anyway, the SAC mission starts eroding the Hollands marriage. Holland experiences an unrealistic crash in Greenland, coming out with only a sore shoulder and his fellow crewman an ankle injury. It's all treated as matter of fact. The rescue effort doesn't come off as any different than the pickup ride on the runway to their plane.

Mrs. Holland becomes pregnant, which Dutch somehow learns before she does! This amps up the stress. When the 21 month hitch is up, the Cardinals come calling as their new 3B is injured. (At 152 RBIs the year before, wouldn't they be calling Holland anyway?) He makes a 'command decision' to stay in the Air Force, not even consulting or mentioning it to his loving (him and baseball) wife. Very 1950s, because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do - and do it poorly. In a burst of realism, she doesn't take it well - but Dutch leaves her crying on the bed while he takes off on yet another long secret mission.

The non-stop flight from FL to Japan affects Holland's shoulder, barely allowing them to land in Okinawa instead with terrible weather and barely any fuel. LeMay cusses him out, but the shoulder is the $1M injury. It gets him out of USAF but apparently won't affect his ball playing. WTH? Mrs. Holland apologizes for her burst of reality, as gets a way too convenient way out of everything. Cue the Air Force March.

Worth a watch with expectations set accordingly. It is a great look into the 1950s Air Force, and some of society too.