I haven’t always been a John Wayne fan. Before becoming truly acquainted with his work, all I knew were the caricatures and jokes about the man. Since I’ve seen films like The Searchers, Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I have come to fully appreciate his screen persona. I’ve also come to find out that the caricatures aren’t totally off, but his strong-will and complete drive on screen is something we haven’t seen since and certainly don’t have today.
Island in the Sky comes toward the end of Wayne’s career, a year after The Quiet Man, but with some of his legendary performances still to come — including The Searchers, Liberty Valance, Rio Bravo and his only Oscar winning turn, True Grit. Basically, though, by this time, audiences already understood and loved the actor. Island in the Sky, unfortunately, doesn’t hold the weight as a film or as a performance of some of the previous films I have mentioned.
In the film, Wayne plays Capt. Dooley, a former WWII pilot who becomes stranded in desolate, uncharted territory where he and his crew and forced to brave the elements while a search party is slowly struggling to find them. Both Wayne and Wellman aren’t new to pictures focused on pilots and flying — Wayne played a pilot at least five times in his career (probably more) and Wellman hit the scene with Wings, the Oscar-winning film focused on pilots in WWI. The experience on both sides leads to a lot of care in the film, and the actors and direction feel very comfortable with the terminology and flight sequences. This is particularly shown in the very first shot of the film, where a camera swoops closely to another airplane in flight, what must be an incredibly difficult shot to pull off is done expertly.
When Dooley isn’t flying, he is battling the elements, the emotional heart of the film. Man vs. nature films are usually intriguing, and the conflict has spread into what seems like dozens of television shows. Island in the Sky successfully finds the tension within these sequences, and although Wayne is always better in action, he pulls a moderately good performance in the quiet emotional scenes herein. The film doesn’t have enough for the crew to do in this environment, though, so much of the film has to follow the search parties who weep over their friends too much and often don’t seem to be doing much else. Although I understand the search to be an important part of the equation, it is far less interesting than spending time with Wayne in the elements. I hate to feel that Wellman and the screenwriter (who also wrote the novel the film is based on) could have given them more to do than sit around as they slowly freeze.
Moreover, the film tries to interject a love-plot between Dooley and his worrying wife, as if he doesn’t have enough reason to escape a freezing environment without any food, water and little shelter. Whenever the film tried to unfairly crank up the emotion during any of these scenes (which I’ll admit aren’t many, but too many), I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. If you look at the official poster of the film, the biggest visible words are “He fought every fury of man and mountain to get to where his woman was!” and then shows a picture of the actress playing “his woman” who is technically in the film for about 2 minutes. This irritates me in two ways: first it is fairly misleading to the actual film, as this isn’t a major plot development; also, it is so manipulative Hollywood that it grosses me out. I would rather these insignificant (in terms of real plot) were cut and I feel the film would be all the better for it. We don’t need any more reason for Dooley and his crew to be saved and they shouldn’t need much more reason to get out alive. I really hate to spend so much time on such a small part of the film, but I don’t think I’m nit-picking since the studio obviously wanted you to feel like this was a driving force of character motivation. The film even ends with a young crew member telling Dooley “I didn’t know you had a wife and kids” to which Dooley replies “Yeah, six of ‘em!” Sadly, I didn’t realize this either, and didn’t even really care.
Overall, Island in the Sky is a film that I wish expanded and gave us more of everything that I liked: airplane footage and Dooley’s struggle with the elements. Instead, the film tries to over-emphasize the emotional aspects of the film through other characters moping around. Simply put, I want my man vs. nature films to fully showcase the struggles, spending time with these characters and giving them interesting, frightening situations to handle. And although we are happy when the crew is saved in the end (SHOCKING SPOILERS!), the journey of the search party is far far less exciting than the journey of those physically affected by the elements.
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