#test pilot

Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in

On March 5th, 1944, Chuck Yeager was flying a P-51 Mustang he'd named Glamorous Glen, after his girlfriend Glennis back home. He was 21, a farm kid from Hamlin, West Virginia, who had enlisted as an aircraft mechanic because he never expected to be allowed to fly at all. That day, on a mission deep over occupied France near Bordeaux, a German fighter caught him from behind and tore his plane apart. He bailed out with shrapnel in his feet and hands and a hole shot through his plane's canopy inches from his head. He came down in a forest crawling with German patrols who had seen the parachute and were already hunting for him.

He hid, bleeding, until French farmers found him. They passed him to the Resistance, and this is where his luck turned. The Maquis moved him from barn to hayloft to farmhouse, feeding him and keeping him one step ahead of the Germans. Yeager had grown up hunting squirrels and rabbits to put meat on the family table, and he knew guns and fuses and powder cold, so he earned his keep by helping them assemble bombs and detonators. He couldn't speak the language, so he communicated in gestures and drawings, a hillbilly kid suddenly in the middle of a French guerrilla war.

To actually get home, he had to walk out of the country. That meant crossing the Pyrenees on foot into neutral Spain, over snow-covered peaks in the tail end of winter, the same passes that killed plenty of fitter men who tried. He didn't go alone. With him was another shot-down American, a bombardier named Pat Patterson, whose lower leg had been shredded by gunfire and was hanging on by little more than a tendon, frostbitten and turning gangrenous. They climbed for days on almost no food. Partway up the mountain Patterson finally passed out cold from the pain and couldn't go on.

Yeager didn't leave him. He pulled out a knife, finished cutting the ruined leg the rest of the way off, tied the stump shut with a spare shirt to stop the bleeding, then hauled the unconscious man up over his shoulder and kept climbing. Near the top a German patrol opened fire on them and the two of them tumbled down an icy slope, but Yeager dragged them both back up and pushed on over the ridge. On the far side he got Patterson to a spot where he'd be found alive by the Spanish, then staggered down into Spain himself, where the Americans eventually pulled him out through Gibraltar and back to England.

By the rules of the day, that should have been the end of his war. Any pilot who'd been shot down and helped by the Resistance was barred from flying combat again in that theater, the fear being that if he were shot down a second time and captured, the Germans could torture the names of the entire network out of him. Yeager refused to accept it. He and another evader took the fight all the way up the chain to General Eisenhower himself at Supreme Headquarters and argued their case in person. Eisenhower let them go back. Yeager returned to the sky, became an ace, once shot down five German planes in a single day, and downed one of Germany's new jet fighters. And a little over three years after being dragged half dead across a mountain, that same West Virginia kid climbed into a rocket plane and became the first human being ever to fly faster than sound.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5)

Some films invite you into their world. Buckaroo Banzai simply assumes you’ve always lived there.

Part sci-fi adventure, part action comedy, part rock-and-roll fever dream, the film follows the brilliant Buckaroo Banzai—physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, Samurai and musician—as he battles interdimensional aliens with the help of his band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. It sounds ridiculous because it absolutely is (Checkout Jeff Goldblum’s urban cowboy look!)… and that’s exactly why it works.

Peter Weller gives Buckaroo an effortlessly cool confidence, while the supporting cast is packed with familiar faces, including John Lithgow delivering one of the most gloriously unhinged performances of his career, it showcases what we would come to expect in a brilliant qwerky early role for Jeff Goldblum as urban cowboy neurosurgeon (Yes that’s his character) New Jersey, and Ellen Barkin is loveable in the role Buckaroo’s dizzy, capable love interest Penny Priddy.

What makes the film endure isn’t its plot—it’s the sheer imagination on display. It throws bizarre ideas at the audience with complete sincerity, never stopping to explain itself, trusting you to either keep up or enjoy the ride. That confidence has earned it a devoted cult following and influenced countless offbeat science-fiction stories that followed.

It’s messy, eccentric and occasionally baffling, but it’s also endlessly charming. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone mixed comic books, pulp serials, 1980s rock music and science fiction into one wonderfully strange package, Buckaroo Banzai is the answer.

Verdict: Not every film needs to make perfect sense. Sometimes it’s enough to be unforgettable.