ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Steineded How sad is this?

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Hot 888 Mama . . . and his child co-stars positioned in a YMCA swimming pool next to him for a scene from ISLAND IN THE SKY feared for their lives, according to Bill Wellman, Jr., son of ISLAND's director (and brother to these two kid actors), in a rogue (as in, not acknowledged on IMDb) DVD extra, DOOLEY'S DOWN: THE MAKING OF ISLAND IN THE SKY. In fact, wee Mikey Wellman was so fearful that Pops Wellman had to rewrite this swim pool scene on the fly. Before joining the air search for John Wayne, who's stranded near the North Pole, Devine's character was supposed to race "his" (that it, director Wellman's) two young sons across the short side of the small "Y" pool. Mikey was so hesitant to flop into the same puddle with a walrus-sized critter that his Daddy-the-Director wrote in a "head start" to get his youngster a little bit out of harm's way. This anecdote is just a small part of DOOLEY'S DOWN. (The Wayne Family's Batjac Company churns out many such efforts, and uses them as pieces of multi-part "Making Ofs" for who knows how many flicks, such as the short about screenwriter Ernie Gann, which is an independent chapter of the "Making Of" for BOTH 1953's ISLAND IN THE SKY, and 1954's THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY.)

classicsoncall For a fair amount of time into the story I suspected that John Wayne was somewhat miscast as Captain Dooley, heading a crew of airmen who force landed their Corsair plane in a vast, uninhabited region of Canadian tundra. It seemed to place him in a passive position as opposed to say, leading a rescue team to find the unfortunate fliers. This all quickly changed during the telling of the story, as Dooley had to summon all the intestinal fortitude he could muster in order to buck up his men's spirits and make decisions in the face of diminishing food, fuel and prospects of a rescue.The picture has an unusually strong supporting cast, though considering the year it was made, a lot of these players probably weren't household names yet. Andy Devine certainly would have been for his many years in movie and TV Westerns, and Lloyd Nolan as well. But James Arness still looked pretty much like a young kid at thirty years old. He had an interesting scene where he got pretty emotional when one of Dooley's transmissions finally makes it proving they were still alive. Paul Fix, another staple character actor of the Western film genre also appears as one of the rescue pilots. You go down the cast list and you surprise yourself with additional names like Bob Steele, Harry Carey Jr., Fess Parker and Gordon Jones, and say, wasn't that Alfalfa Switzer in a co-pilot seat as Sonny Hopper? The film is like a trivia contest come to life.The most heart wrenching scene had to be when one of Dooley's crewmen (Sean McClory as Frank Lovatt) strikes out on his own and gets lost in the fury of an oncoming storm, talking to himself and attempting to back track his footsteps until he succumbs to the elements. There's a bizarre quality to the man's dialog, and the scene is given added poignancy when it's revealed he was within sight of the downed plane when he gives up."Island in the Sky" was made in conjunction with Warner Brothers and John Wayne's own production company BatJac, just about a year before another aviation movie starring Wayne, "The High and the Mighty". Both films were part of the Wayne estate following his death and held in limbo by the family for many years. The later film also has a stellar cast, but suffers in my estimation from a much heralded eleven minute countdown to survival that takes about three times as long in the telling, thereby exhausting the viewer's patience for a resolution. In terms of a recommendation between the two films, flip a coin and then pick this one.

nomoons11 I'll start off by saying that I'm no John Wayne fan. I never liked his wooden western portrayals. They were all alike. I didn't know what to expect with this one but what a surprise...it's an absolute winner.I think this one succeeds because John Wayne isn't the "whole" star of this. This film has an incredible cast that outdo Wayne in most scenes. Most of the film the supporting cast is what you see and boy they really get it done...with conviction.The premise is Dooley and his crew are on their way home from a trip and they run into bad weather over northern Canada and have to crash land the plane in a baron area on the Tundra. The other crew's at their home base in Maine find out and they all proceed to try and find where's he's at in time...before they freeze to death. Here's where the meat of the film is.I can't say enough how great the supporting cast is. They are this film. From James Arness right down to ole Alfalfa from Our gang. They all pitch in make this film a worthy watch.Take a chance on this one and you'll walk away cheering at the end.

fung0 I can't imagine why this film is not more widely known, or more highly valued. I finally caught up with it a couple of years ago on DVD, and was absolutely blown away. This is not only one of the Duke's best performances, it's a tense, entertaining film of rather eerie beauty.The basics seem familiar enough. A transport plane has to put down in the snowy wilds of Northern Quebec. We follow both the desperate search efforts, and the hopeless fight for survival of the frostbitten crew. Wayne is anything but his usual sterling self: irrational, angry, frustrated. The other parts are filled very effectively by square-jawed regulars, including James Arness, Lloyd Nolan and Andy Devine.But the real star is the sense of silent, snowy isolation. The title says it all: this film really makes you feel lost on a frozen island surrounded by empty, barren sky. It makes you feel the sense of hopelessness, knowing just how tiny the odds are of being found. And it does this in a subtle, understated way, almost like a film noir, without the pat melodramatics of the following year's The High and the Mighty. This film shows tough, experienced airmen behaving just about as you'd expect, while keeping the real focus on the detail of the rescue flights. Because, above all, Island in the Sky is a film about flying and fliers.Director William Wellman probably deserves the lion's share of the credit. He's not exactly a household name any more, but he was one of the most reliable directors in Hollywood. There's no Wellman signature style, as such - but films like Yellow Sky, Across the Wide Missouri, The Ox-Bow Incident, even the silent Wings, all bear a similar feeling of solidity, of efficient storytelling in the best Hollywood manner.It's amazing to read some of the derogatory reviews that have been posted. As a sometime pilot myself, I find the film more than credible enough. Sure, it rounds off some of the corners, but then it's an early-1950s Hollywood entertainment, not a 21st Century documentary, and works perfectly on its own level. (Far, FAR better than The High and the Mighty, which is resolved by the copilot encouraging the pilot to do something idiotically dangerous, for which in real life they would both surely have been grounded, IF they survived, which they probably wouldn't.)Equally surprising are some of the complaints about continuity. This film uses real aircraft, and must have been an enormous logistical challenge for Wayne's production company. No, it's not absolutely seamless by the standards of today's $200 million productions. But it is internally consistent and beautifully evocative, which should be more than enough for anyone.Island in the Sky is gripping, thought-provoking and kind of mystical, in its own unique way. It reminds me of the films of Val Lewton - a Hollywood 'formula' entry that manages to soar unforgettably beyond the limitations its genre.