Jet Pilot was produced in 1951 by Howard Hughes, who then refused to release the film until 1957. Andrew Sarris writes: “As a unique demonstration of right-wing camp on a comic strip level, Jet Pilot may be ahead of its time through all eternity. Begun in 1951 and finally released in 1957, it anticipated many of the conceits of Dr. Strangelove and the James Bond series, but as Jean-Luc Godard has observed, the zany comedy of the conception clashed with the dramatic pictorialism of Sternberg's execution, and audiences failed to realize that they were watching a hilarious comedy.... Jet Pilot reduces the Cold War to an animated cartoon where planes enjoy a more active sex life than human beings, and it does so with marvelously high spirits and uninhibited plot invention. The idea of Janet Leigh being a Russian jet pilot sent to entice John Wayne to defect to the Reds might startle even Terry Southern with its audacity. Jules Fruthman, veteran scenarist for both Sternberg and Hawks, is made of sterner stuff. Wayne pretends to succumb to Leigh's wiles, and finds himself in a right-wing cartoonist's version of the Soviet Slave State complete with sneering commissars and brainwashing opiates. Finally, however, Karl Marx runs a poor second to a thick, juicy American steak....” --In “Josef von Sternberg,” a Museum of Modern Art monograph