Author: photog

The High and the Mighty (1954) – Not a Movie Review

photog 2 Comments Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

So, this can’t be a real movie review.  I really haven’t seen the whole movie so it would be false advertising to claim I was a fair reviewer.  But even viewing the part of the movie I watched I felt moved to talk about this “gem.”

There’s something about movies about airliners in danger that seems to liberate the cast and producers from trying to produce a good film.  Whether it’s Dean Martin in “Airport” in the 1970s or Bill Shatner in “Terror at 20,000 Feet” on the Twilight Zone, these airline flights always seem to degenerate into a race to the bottom between the awful plot and the staggeringly bad dialog and wooden acting.

Well, I’m proud to add “The High and Mighty” to this Olympus of aero-schlock.  And it has some amazing features.  Heading up the cast is John Wayne as Dan Roman the first officer on a commercial airliner flying from Honolulu to San Francisco.  The captain is John Sullivan played laconically by Robert Stack whom I only remember as Elliot Ness on tv’s “The Untouchables.”  The only other familiar names in the cast are Robert Newton and Claire Trevor as random passengers and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in a very minor part as a Coast Guard junior officer.  But it really doesn’t matter whether the actors are well-known or unknowns because no actual acting is committed anywhere in the movie that I witnessed.

There is plot and it involves various passengers describing their mental problems or trying to shoot each other over a supposed marital affair but the main event is one of the engines exploding and the plane losing enough fuel to make a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean the aviation peril that every good disaster movie needs.  And so, for about three quarters of the movie the flight engineer, the first officer and the captain bicker about whether they should drop the plane in the ocean or try to make it to San Francisco.  Eventually after the flight engineer realizes that he has been mixing up knots with miles per hour, he delivers the bad news; they will run out of fuel, eleven minutes short of the airport and Robert Stack makes the executive decision that they will ditch.  But John Wayne keeps stalling him because he’s hoping that a tail wind will appear and save them the extra fuel.  But a half hour before the end of the 147-minute movie Stack shouts that he’s going to ditch the plane.  At which point John Wayne slaps him across the face and calls him a pansy (or something) and takes over the controls.  And a few minutes later Stack thanks Wayne for straightening him out and at long last the plane lands without any loss of life or cinematic interest.  When measured by the ground crew there is only thirty gallons of fuel left.

So, do I recommend this movie?  Absolutely.  It’s amazingly bad and without redeeming qualities.  Except one.  John Wayne gets to play John Wayne without any pretense to art.  It’s the Duke slapping around wimps and generating jet fuel out of thin air.  For any real fan of John Wayne that’s enough for an amusing visit.

Easy Does It, Boys

photog 4 Comments Current Events, Trump , ,

I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up.  Now it wasn’t the Ukraine war or the Iran war but it was all war.  And I said I was worried that we might be in a situation where extreme escalation was a possibility.  And my rationale was that nuclear states are starting to get involved in larger conflicts like Ukraine and Iran and if these conflicts start to escalate, they very well might produce situations where the cost of losing is deemed too high by leadership and brinksmanship could drag us into the tactical nuclear scenarios.  And that could very easily spill over into doomsday situations.

Now, I was clear that I thought that Putin, Trump and Xi were all likely to want to keep a lid on any dangerous escalation but the current situations were very, very unstable and dangerous.  And because my mind works by analogies I immediately thought to try and compare this situation to World War I.  Well, it’s really nothing like 1914 except that a relatively minor incident might trigger a general conflagration.  I might compare our current position to that of the British back then and China to Germany and Russia to Austria, let’s say.  And these are just absurdly vague equivalencies but that’s how my gloomy mind works.  But despite the vagueness and the obviously different circumstances today, it occurs to me that things are a lot hotter than they’ve been for a very long time and the balance of power is become a lot less friendly to us.

Now, does this mean I’m digging a bomb shelter and prepping for the apocalypse.  No, I’m not.  But that might have a lot more to do with just how old and tired I am now.  Surviving a nuclear holocaust somewhere between New York City and Boston is an absurdity that I don’t even want to consider.  But at the same time, it feels like rethinking the cold war realities is more relevant than it’s been since the 1990s.

Of course, the other side of this coin is the fact that none of the nuclear powers wants to be seen as weak.  But with drone technology rendering most of the conventional battlefield hardware obsolete it’s very easy for superpowers to get drawn into frustrating and embarrassing regional conflicts that can easily lead to dangerous thinking about the advantages of being a nuclear power.  And regional conflicts seem to be growing in size and number.

Well, anyway, I’ve shared my thoughts or maybe I should say fears.  It’s been a long time since I worried about nuclear war.  And it’s not like anything can be done by the likes of me.  But it just adds another layer of stress to a world that’s already chock full of crises.  Well, I hope Trump and Vance and Rubio are keeping the lines of communication open to Putin and Xi.  Wouldn’t want a miscommunication to turn into the apocalypse.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 25AUG2026 – Bureaucracy of the Military Flavor

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I had a similar situation with my Disability pay when I retired from the Army. Due to a snafu about a separation check when I was RIFed in 1986, I could not get my retirement pay until it was paid back. Basically 2 years’ retirement pay. Meanwhile, I was approved for a 70% VA Disability. I figured that would cover most of the delayed retirement. However, the checks did not show up. When I enquired, I was told that the Disability would be withheld until the separation pay was repaid. After careful examination of the paperwork they sent me, and finding that both checks were being put towards the settlement, the math said that the repayment had been completed six months earlier. When I contacted the VA I got the bureaucratic run around until I demanded to talk to a supervisor. You can’t, the drone said. Why not? I asked. “Its POLICY!”

So, I let them have their policy, and filed a Congressional complaint. Neither Bernie nor Lehey did any good, but amazingly, then-Congressman Welch lit a fire under someone’s ass and six weeks later I got not only my retirement and disability, but $36,000 in Disability backpay!
Keep fighting,
Illegitimi non carborundum!

Next!!!

photog 3 Comments Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Bureaucrats are one of the things that make American life purgatorial.  But small-town bureaucrats are a special case that is worth discussing because of their emergent characteristics.  When I was young and living in New York City, one of the most horrific ordeals that the city could dish out was a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.  The DMV was located in a large old building and there would be many, many lines of New Yorkers waiting to get their business attended to.  Maybe your license was about to expire and you had to pay the fee or get your picture taken or take the eye test or, God forbid, you needed to correct a mistake on the document.  You would wait in one of these lines and hope against hope for quick service.  Eventually, this hope would cruelly die in that first line.  The glacial pace of the line would sooner or later crush your spirit and you took on the same weary, miserable expression of everyone else around you.  And even before you reached the front of the line you would have already sized up the essential traits of the clerk waiting on your line.  She (it was always a woman) had a face that could stop a clock and her IQ probably hovered around 75 and she worked and talked so slowly that you weren’t sure from moment to moment whether she had lapsed into a coma.  But regardless of her demeanor and obvious imbecility the only thing you knew going in was that she would declare your problem didn’t fit her services ands she would redirect you to the back of some other line.  And this same process might be repeated several times until finally you might just flee the building rather than risk arrest for assaulting a public servant.

But small towns do not possess this kind of apparatus.  Even at tax time they do not possess the vast numbers of citizens needed to turn lines into killing fields.  They just don’t.  But what the bureaucracy of a small town does possess in spades is kooks.  Once again, they’re all women (well not the road department but they’re not really bureaucrats) and they often have faces that could stop clocks but their scope of influence is limited.  There just aren’t enough people in town hall to endlessly stall a tax payer from receiving some government service.  So instead of delay they’ve developed the art of obfuscation to a high art form.  I was talking to the assistant town clerk of Dunwich and wanted to clear up a problem having to do with the misspelling of a road name.  And it was complicated.  Both names that were listed in various state databases were incorrect but I wanted to determine who had jurisdiction over what the correct name actually was.  She sent me to the Assessor’s Office but the Assessor was out of the office for a while and so I got the assistant to the Assessor.  I might as well have been speaking to a parrot.  She kept taking the information I gave her and mixing it up in her mind and when I tried to correct her, she just talked over me and tried to solve the wrong problem.  And of course, she just kept getting more and more confused and excited until she was just rattling her mantra about how these kinds of problems were usually the taxpayer’s fault.  Finally, she told me to call the Post Office because they knew what everyone’s address was supposed to be.  But when I mentioned that the Post Office was a federal agency and the state should be the ones with the official records, she told me I had to come back when the Assessor was back because I was upsetting her.

And that’s what I did.  The Assessor knew all about the incorrect names in the databases and told me that the state had issued a statement pointing to the documents that contained the correct name.  It took all of two minutes to answer the question.  The assistant was at her desk with her head buried in her paperwork and studiously ignored my interaction with her boss.  So, is the small-town bureaucrat worse than her city relative?  Absolutely not.  There is none of the moronic sadism that is on display in Gotham.  And honestly, I’m sure the assistant assessor isn’t abysmally stupid.  She’s just a fuzzy headed old lady who isn’t up to any kind of logical thinking when anything is out of the ordinary.  But it does make for an ordeal at Dunwich town Hall.  Next!!!