Sick SAC

A Gathering of Eagles. The Strategic Air Command is magnificent matter for an epic film, for a Lawrence of the wild blue yonder. But the only previous picture on the subject, 1955's Strategic Air Command, was just a big, slick, did-you-ever-see-such-a-crazy-tractor romance in which Jimmy Stewart fell in love with a $3,000,000 airplane and took off for Cloud Nine. Now Hollywood has, in effect, remade the movie with glittering new hardware (B-52s instead of B-47s) and a dull old theme: "Will SACcess spoil Rock Hudson?" Rock is an Air Force colonel assigned to command a SAC Wing that has just flunked its Operational Readiness Inspection. His job is to make the Wing straighten up and fly right, and he works brutally hard at the job -- with the in evitable domestic complications. His wife (Mary Peach), who feels with some reason that her fuselage is more interesting than a B-52's, chews him out for spending too much time in the SAC.

She may or may not be right, but from that point forward the script consistently suggests that the men who hold the front line of the free world's defenses aren't half as scared of the Russians as they are of the little woman.

Rock's little woman soon has him flying in circles. When he cashiers his base commander (Barry Sullivan) for ship ping too much sauce, she denounces Rock as a martini-counting martinet.

And when he fires his best friend (Rod Taylor) for "winning friends and losing efficiency," she indignantly decides to fly home to mother. Rock faces the climactic question: Can a man have marriage and a career besides? What's more important: Is SAC really all that sick? The film provides impressive evidence to the contrary. The spectator sees the inside of a SAC command post, and he briefly watches it work. He also sees the great B-52s, each one almost the size of a football field, form in vast flights and flash through the central blue like an armada of aluminum archangels. Clearly the nation's defenses are founded on something far more solid than a Rock.

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