Tom Cruise’s Hit Revives Sternberg’s Last American Film

Like the rising tide that lifts all boats, Top Gun: Maverick has given the world its only boon since the Covid lockdowns. Even conservative pundits express gratitude for Tom Cruise’s comeback action picture, finding relief from the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and other embarrassments of the current regime. So is it churlish to ask whether Top Gun: Maverick could be better?

It could have been Jet Pilot, the ingenious Josef von Sternberg film from 1957 in which John Wayne as American military pilot Colonel Jim Shannon falls in love with Russian agent-aviator Anna Marladovna (Janet Leigh) when she violates American airspace. Wayne commands the other fliers in his squadron, “I want that Russian jet down in one piece” — a double entendre that Sternberg and longtime screenwriting collaborator Jules Furthman extend into an extra-military metaphor. Now available in a breathtaking Blu-Ray restoration from Kino-Lorber, Jet Pilot confirms that Maverick’s aeronautics story had the potential to be more than what Variety used to call an “actioner.”

Jet Pilot was filmed over an 18-month period ending in 1953, but producer Howard Hughes, who had enlisted the U.S. Air Force’s assistance, tinkered with it for another four years before its release. Hughes depicted a U.S.–Soviet Cold War different from Maverick’s vague Eastern bloc antagonism and today’s proxy war. But Sternberg plays out a Cold War pantomime that parallels the hot war of male–female relations. When Leigh is apprehended and searched, the comedy of her half-striptease shows Sternberg’s legendary interest in sensuality as a key to human spiritual communication. Appreciating this requires adult sophistication — Jet Pilot is not camp — as well as understanding Hollywood’s pop culture.

Cruise, of the Star Wars generation, may not have a fully mature sense of art or drama, but he has shown the wit and intelligence — from Tropic Thunder to Lions for Lambs — to make conscientious work just as Sternberg thought to do. Yet Maverick’s formulaic romantic subplot falls short of what makes Jet Pilot special: Shannon and Marladovna’s relationship is manipulated for espionage by each side’s government, but sexual tension overrides political protocol. Speaking of the pair, Shannon’s major general (Jay C. Flippen) says, “The most perfect case of ambivalence I ever saw. Double values. They both like and hate each other.”

These double values reflect the ambivalence that conservatives feel about Hollywood. But in the mold of Sternberg, Hughes, and Wayne — whose series of ’50s air dramas (including Island in the Sky and The High and the Mighty) provided richer pleasures than Maverick — they should aim higher. Shannon’s buddy (Paul Fix) philosophizes, “Americans are so simple about this freedom thing. They don’t seem to realize they’re cooking the calf in the milk of its own mother.” That’s wisdom that Spielberg ignored about the Francis Gary Powers agent in Bridge of Spies.

Jet Pilot is Sternberg’s version of Ninotchka — a comedy in which international conflicts are resolved through Western comforts and pleasures — briefly in Palm Springs as opposed to Paris, the proving ground of Lubitsch’s classic farce. In Sternberg’s vision (the most sensual and spiritual in Hollywood history), politics are seen as a test of morality. More than a fantasy about political détente, it’s about eternal and universal human complicity. Wayne exhibits peak masculine authority, his ardor completed by Leigh’s shapely femininity. (“I’m not going back to Russia without that nightgown!”) Anna explains their movie-star affinity: “Like religion, love makes you forget your duty to the state.” The couple’s mutual betrayal (and self-betrayal) suggests a comic version of Sternberg’s Dishonored. As an artist, he always had supreme clarity about human sexuality.

Jet Pilot is also extraordinary for its absolutely clear Technicolor flight scenes. General Chuck Yeager is said to have flown most of the aerobatics in the movie, and Hughes got state-of-the-art aircraft: the Lockheed F-94 Starfire, the Convair B-36B Peacemaker, the Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star, the North American B-45 Tornado, the F-86A Sabre, the Northrop F-89 Scorpion, the Boeing B-50 as well as the famous Bell X-1.

These flight scenes make better use of jet technology than Maverick does. As metaphor, the film’s flying and flipping stunts over Yuma outdo Kubrick’s sophomoric fuel-pump copulation in Dr. Strangelove. Hughes’s airplane fetish, which Scorsese overlooked in The Aviator, is fulfilled.

Enthusiasm for Top Gun: Maverick revives the old-fashioned understanding that American movies are best when, like economic policy that lifts all boats, they have broad appeal. The MCU millennium demonstrates the opposite: limiting movie appeal to adolescent taste, including topical cynicism that shuts out more discerning moviegoers. Pop-culture conservatives who generally have an overly grateful relationship to Hollywood product, aren’t very demanding but should appreciate Jet Pilot’s perfect pop. Anyone who doesn’t see that Top Gun is silly is being silly.