In the era of Netflix and other ways of easily obtaining movies this might not be so useful, but Sunday morning at 2AM Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will air “Chain Lightning,” the 1950 movie with Humphrey Bogart as a test pilot flying something pretty rare at the time… a futuristic airplane that was actually built in mockup form for the movie. Much more common was for a real aircraft to be painted for the flick… or for simple stock footage to be used. While the stock footage option was cheap and lame, the fact is that the late 40’s into the 50’s produced so many aircraft prototypes that many could be introduced in a movie and most people would have had no idea what it was.
Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve never seen this before. Hurrah for DVR.
UPDATE: finally watched this this morning while working on other stuff. As far as plot, dialogue, characters… meh. Usual 1950’s stuff: Morons With Something To Prove act like idiots, people die, derring-do, blah, blah, blah. The movie had a lot more visual effects than I expected; and while pretty awful by current standards, they were probably fairly impressive at the time. The “JA-3” aircraft is never described as either a jet or a rocket, but given the apparent lack of an inlet, it must be a rocket. But one with truly astonishing performance; standard range for this thing was 4,000 miles.
The JA-3 was represented in three ways… the full scale mockup for closeup shots, a scale model for in-flight shots (photos of the model as it existed some years ago just before being auctioned off are available HERE) and a North American F-86 for distant in-flight shots. the F-86 stock footage wasn’t all that bad, in context.
The mockup was built on top of a P-39, so scaling the design should be straightforward.
Doesn’t seem to be on Blu-Ray, but it’s available on DVD.