Sabre Jet

This has to be the worst aviation movie ever.

At first, when I saw it listed on my upcoming viewing list, I was excited, as I had never seen this picture. Now I know why I had never seen it.

I almost feel like digging up the writers, producers and director of this bomb and ask for compensation for the time I wasted watching it.

The use of stock footage is badly edited and contains many shots of WWII aircraft and if you are an aviation buff at all, you have seen these shots a hundred times and can recognize each aircraft used. American and German WWII aircraft abound in this Korean era story. There is not even an attempt to make these shots work as Korean era combat.

What was the budget for this turkey? Using F-86 aircraft poorly disguised to represent MiGs is terrible. Yuck, horrible. Mere words cannot express how bad, with a capital B, this picture is.

Avoid it at all cost.

Pass it by. This movie stinks !

There were many films speaking of the Korean War, mostly B pictures, such as this one. It is a quickly forgettable flick, the McDonalds of the movie consumption. But the most interesting here is that this fillm belongs to the handful of ones that director Louis King made by the end of his career. He mostly gave us grade Z and B yarns, fast watched and forgotten movies, except maybe the crime films for Paramount made in the late thirties, starring Lloyd Nolan and J Caroll Naish. And suddenly, during the early fifties, he was given bigger budgets and offered us this kind of film, and also MASSACRE, POWDER RIVER, DANGEROUS MISSION...This very one, is not my favorite, though. I guess you have noticed.

Agree with you guys about some of the stock footage. TOP GUN, it ain't, but, even the bad stuff is good, since,,, ya can't see any real Sabre Jets anymore,,, except for ONE that has been restored and does the air shows. Early Robert Stack is priceless, considering his Elliot Ness, and Airplane work with Zucker and Abrams. The part that always got me was the Korean pilot who got shot up, and rips off his face mask. In the theatrical version I saw, that was when a black and white movie switched to color for all the blood in the cockpit. Yeeecht!~! The McConnell Story is a bit better, and The Hunters is better yet, especially for the flying sequences, but this one was thoroughly enjoyable for a ten year old kid who loved airplanes and lived for those Saturday Matinée double features. So, yeah, it's a turkey, but, what the heck --- Gobble Gobble~!!~! ;-)

This independent United Artist release is a small nugget of gold among a lot of aviation pictures made on much bigger budgets. Sabre Jet makes good use of aerial combat footage from Korea, nicely integrated into the plot of this film which is really about the home life of our fighter pilots flying missions in the Korean War from a base in Japan.

I doubt the enlisted men of the Air Force did this well, but for our fighter pilots the Air Force provided housing and the wives and children lived on the base and though it looks tacky, it's like any other suburban community. The pilots just take off in the morning, do their bit in Korea and then come home for supper to home and hearth. The only difference is that some do make it home and some don't in Sabre Jet.

Coleen Gray is a reporter and the estranged wife of Colonel Robert Stack whose been given an assignment to do a human interest story on the wives and she chooses Stack's base for the assignment. The two are estranged as Stack is an alpha male who wants the women home, barefoot and he'll take care of the pregnant department.

It's a bit rough with Stack for her, but Gray gets a lot of good material from the other wives at the base. They want to talk about their men, they're proud military wives. Her best material comes from Julie Bishop the wife of base commander Richard Arlen. In fact some of the best scenes are with Bishop and Arlen and their two boys.

The last 10 minutes or so are devoted to an aerial dogfight and the combat footage is well integrated into the black and white film. Like many other air films post World War II Sabre Jet is a recruiting film for the new United States Air Force. So for that matter is Top Gun made a generation or two later.

Stack, Gray, Arlen, and Bishop and the rest aren't big in the hero department. They're the guys who have a tough day at the office and the women who wait for them. Sabre Jet shot on an F string budget is a nice film, no frills, but good performances throughout and nice aerial combat footage.

A very good movie concerning the men who flew combat aircraft known as Sabre Jets during the Korean War. Robert Stack does an excellent job as a brooding combat pilot presented with the daily anxieties of life and death in the air over Korea while embroiled in a reunion with his ex, who is stationed at the same Air Force base as a journalist. Good interplay between Coleen Gray and Robert Stack in this role. The plot, of course, has been used before in WWII movies, but the urgency of the then new jet aircraft and jet combat makes the situations more tense. The air combat scenes are spectacular if you'll forgive the painting of American aircraft as Russian built MIG's. Along the same lines but based more on real characters is The McConnell Story, made two years later in 1955. Sabre Jet is a movie that will appeal to air combat fans with a decent storyline as well.