Friday, October 28, 2022

Jet Pilot (1957)

 A female Soviet spy posing as a refugee lands in the U.S. and seduces an American. After they get married his superiors warn him of her real agenda. They then assign him with an intelligence mission in Russian territory, using his relationship with her as cover.

Sexual-espionage farce with lots of aerial sequences. While not exactly good, it is not boring either. The script has two points worth analyzing. (1) In one enigmatic delivery, Shannon seems to imply that one must be careful regarding the concept of Freedom so as to avoid "cooking the calf in the milk of its own mother". Now, this is enigmatic even in the original biblical context from where it was borrowed. In the metaphorical usage of the film, the best I can come up with as an interpretation is that Freedom ("Mother's Milk") should not be granted to those who will use it for destroying Freedom ("cooking the calf"). (2) 'Olga' the Soviet agent asserts at one point: "With us, the state is everything. The individual has no right to even think of himself." At a later point, she remarks: "In other words, you believe the individual must sacrifice his personal feelings and work with somebody else for the benefit of the whole enterprise? (...) The idea's purely capitalistic. No wonder every loyal Russian instinctively rejects it." Those two separate utterances describe roughly the same worldview in slightly different words, first attributing it to the Soviets, and then to the Americans. Was the writer being ironic or just moronic?

Rating: 42

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