Very disappointing...

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

68/100. Not one of Jimmy Stewart's best films, but not fault of his. He is terrific. June Allyson, I don't know what exactly it is I don't like about her. I feel her performances are so rehearsed and phony. She is way too sappy and understanding in this film and I feel she hurts the films overall effect. Some excellent aerial photography, good score and the entire production is top notch. It waves the flag a little excessively and the mix of personal drama and action sequences is at times a little awkward. The supporting cast is a bit bland, Harry Morgan and Rosemary deCamp stand out as the best. Good special effects. The color in the film was exceptionally crisp.

How many miles of celluloid have been exposed in the business of glorifying the men and planes that dropped the bombs that burned the cities? "Too many" is not a flippant answer.Strategic Air Command (1955) is the supreme ideological example of the (for want of a better word) "USAF genre" movie. Washington's defeat in the Korean War thwarted plans to overturn socialism in the USSR and curb anti-colonial struggles via atomic intimidation, and created the stalemate between imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat we have come to call the Cold War. And in the Cold War, so far as Washington and its Madison Avenue and Hollywood drum-beaters were concerned, the newly inaugurated USAF had center stage. The gleaming technology and Triumph of the Will-flavored esprit de corps adumbrated in movies like this created the image of professional and self-sacrificing organization men. It was beside the point that the organization they ran, and still run, is an international murder machine pushing the violent rule of the world's final empire.Strategic Air Command is no sensitive treatment of such "organization" men, the men in the "gray flannel suit." It is, instead, about the satisfaction to be found when men (and their wives) embrace the shipwreck of their lives and careers on the rocks of a necessity called National Security.James Stewart played his finest roles in 1950s-era Hollywood movies. He played them in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. For Hitchcock he played men appalled to learn what transgressions they were capable of justifying and carrying-out. These were the films Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). For Anthony Mann he played rough and ready loners warring against their own egos and larger social necessities in Winchester 73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953).Anthony Mann in the 1950s moved away from tyro kitchen sink crime films like T Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) and into Freudian westerns like The Furies (1950). He finished as a director of historical epics on the scale of nineteenth century French history painting: Cimarron (1960), El Cid (1961), and most grandly The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).Strategic Air Command was manufactured by Paramount Pictures. It espouses "professional military conformity" writ very large. If anyone other than the Pentagon can be identified as the film's "auteur" it is screenwriters Beirne Lay Jr. (1909-1982) and Valentine Davies (1905-1961). Lay in particular, a former officer with the Army Air Corps during World War Two, made a career out of Air Power books and movies. He co-wrote 12 O'clock High (1948), that hymn to "maximum effort" and bureaucratic cold-bloodedness in the service of U.S. plutocracy, and then went to Hollywood to work on the script for the 1949 film of the same name. In 1952 Lay wrote the film Above and Beyond (1952), about the trials and tribulations of another friend of humanity, Colonel Paul Tibbetts. (Lay later wrote that perfect genuflection before the U.S. officer caste, The Gallant Hours (1960), a religious peroration on the career of Admiral Halsey.) In many ways Strategic Air Command is a fictional re-telling of Above and Beyond. The dramatic spine of both movies is the education of a husband and wife in their responsibilities as cogs in the great engine of national war-making. In both, the wives have the worst of it, waiting on the ground and learning to curb their tongues about secrecy and missed dinners. June Allyson seemed to only play these roles in the 1950s. In addition to Strategic Air Command, she played the valiant and saintly help-meet in The Stratton Story (1949), Executive Suite (1954), The Glen Miller Story (1954) (also starring James Stewart and written by Valentine Davies), and The McConnell Story (1955).James Stewart plays professional baseball player and Air Force reservist "Dutch" Holland. Recalled to active duty, his resentment against the USAF for destroying his civilian career is eventually broken by the glamour of the new jet bomber he learns to fly (accompanied by Victor Young's lushly carnal and languorous musical score.) Along the way he meets SAC's supreme commander, General Hawks. Hawks is clearly a fictional avatar of Curtis Le May. Hawks is played by veteran character actor Frank Lovejoy. Lovejoy, now long forgotten, appeared in hundreds of movies, including such Cold War gems as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and Men of the Fighting Lady, a 1954 tribute to naval aviation during the Korean War."It all boils down to less danger of war," Hawks tells Dutch Holland. It all has to do with what we came to call deterrent and mutual-assured-destruction. Eventually the stifling moral cynicism of imperialists like General Hawks would be rejected, but until the Wall Street barons and the state that defends their rule is finally removed from power, the real SAC will thrive.Is Strategic Air Command worth watching? A feminist scholar could certainly make a career, or at least a dissertation, out of the films of June Allyson. A post-modern cultural theorist could find full employment deconstructing the fetishized imagery of strategic bombers sweeping toward gorgeous golden sunsets. (Indeed, Stanley Kubrick has already sent it up in the opening credits of Dr Stangelove.) What can communists get out of Strategic Air Command? Well, communists all love James Stewart movies, and better Strategic Air Command than 1959's The FBI Story. Chew popcorn to avoid grinding teeth, comrades.

As military films go, "Strategic Air Command" is pretty run-of-the-mill. It is most likely that the lack of constant action (we are talking the post-Korean war Cold War era) is what keeps it from being very absorbing.Jimmy Stewart, as Lt. Col. Robert 'Dutch' Holland, is a former baseball player recruited into SAC despite his initial lack of enthusiasm. And his wife June Allyson (as Sally Holland) is even less thrilled as her husband is thrust into the maelstrom of lengthy patrols, uneven schedules and seemingly endless on-call status situations. And of course there is the inherent danger and uncertainty that adds considerable stress in a military family.June Allyson is on the short list of my least favorite Hollywood women stars. Apparently many liked her almost constant portrayals of "the gal I left behind". I instead picture her as one of the least hot women I've seen in leading roles – sort of another Doris Day. She is right on cue here, demonstrating her Susie Homemaker type, and eventually seems to be a regular spoilsport.Jimmy Stewart, also an actor I am not too thrilled about – discounting primarily his work with Alfred Hitchcock – plays his usual mostly affable sort, but he does show us a tough streak in parts of the movie. And he does convey pretty well the effects that the strain of long flights and topsy-turvy schedules has on a person in those scenes. To his advantage in this film, Stewart was the real deal, having been a decorated Air Force pilot.The film relies on tried-and-true Hollywood plot lines; all the usual concerns of family life are trotted out. So we are leaning pretty heavily to the sentimental side of things.Nonetheless, the photography is remarkable. The live footage of contemporary state-of-the-art aircraft, in flight, on the ground, and even during ground operations is very good. There is a scene of in-flight refueling, which in my view is the edgiest moment of the movie, that makes us think "I still don't really see how that works", even though it is skillfully captured.The film had an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story. That stumps me; the award it did receive was a Special Citation for the Aerial Photography from National Board of Review, and that was well deserved.Two and a half stars.

If good intentions made a film great, then this film might be one of the greatest films ever made. The film has great actors, a master director, a significant theme--at least a would-be significant theme, undertone of fifties existential world-weariness, aerial scenes that ought to have thrilled both senses and imagination, and characters about which one might deeply care. It is about patriotism and about patriotism in a healthy way.Not quite ten years after the film, I knew Air Force officers who taught my R.O.T.C. classes at university. They were intellectuals. They thought deeply about their work. They has senses of humor. One had been a crew member on the first plane to drop a hydrogen bomb. I have wondered if any one of them died in Vietnam. I imagine that they flew missions there.Regrettably, the film fails. The movie lacks visual interest, drama, expression of feeling, and celebration of the very patriotism that underlines the narrative. No actress has been worse used that June Allison in this movie. Her Susan Holland is a woman that one would flee, not embrace. Col. James Stewart (who as then a colonel) makes a good stab at this role as Lt. Col(and later Col.) Dutch Holland. But the most interesting thing he does in the role is bite into a sandwich. I'm not kidding. Stewart was good as biting in sandwiches as he did in The Spirit of Saint Louis. One might think of Ted Williams, but I don't when I watch Mr. Steward in the role. I do think of William Holden as Lt. Harry Brubaker in The Bridges at Toko-Ri . The comparison is not good for Mr. Stewart, who seems wasted in this film.Footage shot from a B-36 looks like outtakes from commercials for an airline. Though beautiful, the aerial shots are mundane. For the time, they might have impressed viewers. The crash in Greenland involves unexciting modeling You expect the outcome to be good.The undertone--the subtext-- for the film voices the tedium that Air Force flight crews must have felt during their long missions and the banality that the Air Force used to make its business--well business like any other business. One imagines how a La Nouvelle Vague director might explore this theme and then one begins to think about how someone with imagination might have filmed this movie. Little moments are missed.When crews returned from long missions, the members of the crew got a shot of scotch and a massage before debriefing the mission. Showing that might have helped.Banality was the image the Air Force wanted and Mr. Mann accommodated the brass. Maybe, in that sense, the film works, but not for me.I mourn when I watch the movie, because I think all of us, director, actors, crew, viewers, and members of the armed services might have enjoyed giving and getting much more than we get here.I don't think that this movie had to be Dr. Strangelove or 2001, both of which it presages, but it had potential never realized. Yet, I enjoy watching it. I think of the airmen on their long missions and the ground crews in isolated places. There is a certain sense of honor celebrated here and I celebrate that honor. I certainly understand why people who praise this movie here and other places appreciate it. If there were no intentional fallacy, it would get a 10 from me..