Tonight's movie was called "Chain Lightning" (1950) and starred.......(hmmm, let's see, who did it star?)......oh yeah, that's right it starred Humphrey Bogart. Who'd ya think it starred? I will have to go over to IMDB, maybe tomorrow, and try to figure out how many Bogie movies I have seen and how many more I still have to go. Anyway, "Chain Lightning" was a good one. Bogart plays an Air Force Test Pilot who is qualifying a new supersonic jet so that it can be okayed for manufacture. The jet resembles Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 and is capable of Mach Two. Bogie's girlfriend is the beautiful Eleanor Parker. She doesn't want him to keep flying because the tests are becoming more and more dangerous, but flying is what he lives for so she puts up with it.
The story begins with his final test flight and is told in flashback after that. Bogart's Air Force career started in WW2, where he flew B-17 Flying Fortresses over Germany. He happens to meet the designer of that famous bomber and complains to him about weaknesses in it's design. Because the script is half romance, we see Bogie proposing marriage to Parker the night before a fateful mission. The next thing we know, the story fast forwards to postwar. Now Humphrey is out of the service and is trying to make ends meet by running a small flight school out in the sticks. He runs into an old wartime buddy (James Brown......no, not that James Brown), who is still in the Air Force but in peacetime mode, and this friend has connections to the new flight research being undertaken in the dawning Jet Age.
Bogie is interested in learning more, and of course the friend's main connection turns out to be the guy who designed the B-17 who Bogie met six years ago during the war. He didn't like the guy then. But the designer is now working on a supersonic jet and he has a backer, a very wealthy aerospace manufacturer clearly based on Howard Hughes and played by Raymond Massey. The designer is ready to recommend Humphrey for the job as #1 Test Pilot for the new jet......but than the romance kicks back in, because Bogie's old WW2 girlfriend, whom he was set to marry at the end of the war before fate intervened, is now involved with the talented aircraft designer.
It's one of those motion picture situations where the woman is torn between two men, but the outcome is clear to the designer. He knows that Parker loves Bogart more than him, but he still needs Bogie to fly his jet, and things get tricky from there, because Raymond Massey is supplying the money for all of the design work, and he wants to blow Chuck Yeager's speed record out of the water because he loves headlines (another direct reference to Howard Hughes).
The grand finale of the film begins when Massey proposes a high speed flight, at 90,000 feet altitude, from Nome, Alaska to Washington, D.C., by way of the North Pole. He says that Bogart will complete the flight in no more than four and one half hours.
This final sequence is very exciting stuff, mostly because of the excellent special effects of the time, which show the jet in flight at high altitude and are combined with stock footage of actual test flights from Edwards Air Force Base to produce an impressive action sequence that, for it's time, would pin audiences in their seats for close to twenty minutes. It even does so today and I would bet that "Chain Lightning" has been an influence on subsequent movies like "Top Gun", just for it's aerial photography.
"Chain Lightning" is extra fun if you are an aviation enthusiast, because there is a lot of location shooting at an early version of Burbank Airport, and also at Edwards. The three way romance is going to play itself out in a somewhat formulaic way, but not without some final drama related to the final flight test.
This one is mostly about the planes, and on those terms it gets Two Thumbs Up from me. It's not a classic Bogie character study, like last night's "The Big Shot" with it's megascript and multi-layered story, but as an action picture it is most excellent, especially for airshow fans like yours truly. ////
I am supertired, so I'm gonna get some sleep and I will see you in the morning.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxo :):)
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