Wayne stars as Dooley, a civilian commercial pilot working with the Army Transport Service. During a routine flight, his converted DC-3 plane is forced to make an emergency landing in the uncharted Canadian wilderness (in the Labrador Peninsula, not Greenland, as stated in some synopses) after its wings become glazed with ice. His men - co-pilot Lovatt (Sean McClory), navigator Murray (James Lydon), radioman D'Annunzia (Wally Cassell), and engineer Stankowski (Hal Baylor) - all survive the crash, but Dooley is all too aware of the mess they're in. With no fix on their position, with thousands of uncharted square miles of pine trees and iced-over lakes, and with limited power left on their generator and 70-below temperatures outside, Dooley knows there's no guarantee they're going to come out of this alive.

Meanwhile, Colonel Fuller (Walter Abel) assembles a rescue mission composed of pilots and their crews chomping at the bit to locate their missing comrades, Moon (Andy Devine), Stutz (Lloyd Nolan), and Handy (Allyn Joslin) among them.

Island in the Sky was based on screenwriter/novelist Ernest K. Gann's own experiences as an air transport pilot, and this combined with director William A. Wellman's passion and experience shooting aerial adventures give the picture verisimilitude. The means used to try and locate Dooley's plane, both standard procedure and improvised hunches, have a real authenticity. Aerial cinematographer William Clothier captured some fantastic footage of the DC-3s in flight, including a spectacular introduction of Dooley's plane that begins as a long shot and elegantly drifts into a close-up that would have made Clark Gable envious.

This said, the script is rather clunky, full of restless narration (by an uncredited Wellman), fitful voice-overs (Dooley, who thinks to himself about his crew's chances but prays aloud), and completely unneeded flashbacks. The film cuts back-and-forth between Dooley's crew struggling against the elements and the rescue mission's long needle-in-a-haystack searches, but the film would've been better had it stuck to one story or the other. The loneliness and uncertainty of Dooley and his men wondering if they're going to found before they freeze to death is greatly undermined by cutaways to scenes of comedy relief involving Wellman regular George Chandler and Wayne protegee James Arness, and a misplaced sequence of Andy Devine swimming with his boys at the local YMCA.

The aerial and location footage (shot near Truckee, California) is visually interesting, but a lot of it doesn't at all match scenes shot in the studio. When the wings and windows of Dooley's plane are overrun with ice during a nighttime flight, the film unconvincingly cuts to day-for-night shots of a real DC-3, clearly with the sun at its back and with no ice on it at all. After their plane has crashed on a frozen lakebed near shore, a big deal is made of the lack of food and firewood, and though the script tries to explain this (the trees have too much sap in them to burn properly, no animals can be seen), their plight is never entirely believable. Couldn't they cut a hole in the ice and fish, for instance?

There are nice touches throughout, such as the eerie silence of the wasteland where the plane has crashed, and a later scene where three rescue planes fly virtually overhead, and the crew's joy turns to despair as they realize the planes didn't spot them. Wayne is very good here, allowing a thinly-disguised panic to sweep across his face for perhaps the only time in his long career.

The picture is crammed with familiar faces, including Fess Parker in an uncredited bit part. Harry Carey, Jr., Bob Steele, Darryl Hickman, Paul Fix, Mike Connors, and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (amusing as a co-pilot ready to catnap everywhere he goes) are featured.

Video & Audio

Island in the Sky is presented in a decent full frame transfer with excellent blacks and detail, but some noticeable phasing (for lack of a better word), which resembles but I don't think actually is the result of warped film. Some parts of the image seem to go in and out of focus; this is very noticeable but doesn't ruin the experience. Another question concerns the film's original aspect ratio and audio, presented on the DVD in 2.0 mono. The film went into release during the fall of 1953 and, as newsreel footage of the premiere shows quite plainly, was originally presented in "Giant Wide Screen" and in "Stereophonic Sound." Readjusted to 1.77:1, the framing looks cramped suggesting a recommended theatrical aspect ratio of perhaps 1.66:1 or even less than that. Wellman and his DPs, shooting late in 1952 and/or early in 1953, may even have staged their scenes with a full-frame presentation in mind, as there's rarely the kind of headroom one associates with standard (1.66:1 - 1.85:1) cropped wide screen, so all-in-all the full frame presentation is reasonable. (Paramount's War of the Worlds was reissued late in 1953 in widescreen, but the cropping was extremely slight, something like 1.5:1. This may have been repeated for Island in the Sky.) As for the stereophonic sound, one assumes it has been lost and its original use may very well have been limited to a few premiere screenings. For the record and to Paramount's credit the original Warner Bros. logo has been retained, and the opening titles are windowboxed. Optional English subtitles are included.

A big complaint from my colleague DVD Savant concerning the Paramount/Batjac DVD of The High and the Mighty needs echoing here. Once loaded into a DVD player, the disc leads viewers on a path through not one but two long montages of highlights and spoilers before the feature has even begun. Load the DVD and viewers not quick with their remote's scan button must sit through several minutes of clips. Once the menu screen has been reached, those wishing to avoid the Introduction by Leonard Maltin get it whether they select that option or not. The introduction is a virtual summary and highlight reel and is best skipped altogether.

Extra Features

Quite unlike Paramount's usual library titles, Island in the Sky is packed with extras. Running 41 minutes, The Making of Island in the Sky is really four mini-documentaries, with only about eight minutes of that, in a segment called Dooley's Down, actually dealing with the film's production. Nonetheless, the piece hits all the salient points, and features interviews with Leonard Maltin, William Wellman, Jr., Darryl Hickman (looking rather amazing at 74), 1st Assistant Director Andrew V. McLaglen, Harry Carey, Jr., and others.

Ernest K. Gann: Adventurer, Author, and Artist is a very interesting short biography of Island in the Sky's screenwriter, who also wrote The High and the Mighty, Fate is the Hunter (an underrated movie, by the way), and many other aerial adventure-dramas. Flight School: The Art of Aerial Cinematography is a tribute to legendary DP Bill Clothier, whose career stretched from 1927's Wings to most of John Wayne's later films. The John Wayne Stock Company: Harry Carey, Jr. is a most welcome tribute/interview with the veteran character actor, whose father was an early cowboy star (and later a fine character actor himself) and who, after his father's death, had key roles in such films as John Ford's Three Godfathers (1949) and The Searchers (1956). It's a treat. Flying for Uncle Sam, curiously not part of the Making of package, offers an overview of the Air Transport's history during World War II, and is filled with lots of blurry stock shots.

An Audio Commentary by Leonard Maltin, Darryl Hickman, James Lydon, William Wellman, Jr. and aviation expert Vincent Longo is better than most, one of the relatively few worth sitting all the way through for. A Theatrical Trailer is complete with narration and text, while a Photo Gallery is also better than average. Newsreel Footage of the Premiere includes brief clips of stars in front of Hollywood's Paramount Theater, and Introduction to Gunsmoke Promo has Wayne's famous plug for the 1955 premiere of that long-running Western series, starring Duke's pal James Arness.

Lastly there's an intriguing Batjac Montage, promising upcoming DVD releases not only of the long-withheld Hondo and McLintock!, both starring Wayne, but movies produced by Wayne's company in which he did not star: Track of the Cat (16:9 enhanced), Man in the Vault, Plunder of the Sun, Ring of Fear, and Seven Men from Now.

Parting Thoughts

With its bevy of extras, this is a must-have for John Wayne fans, even though Island in the Sky is itself only fairly good. Paramount/Batjac needs to learn that not everyone wants to learn everything about a movie immediately before settling down to watch it, but overall their presentation is Highly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.