24 Hour Alert (Warner Bros., Mark VII Limited, United States Air Force, Walt Disney Productions, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Johanna Enlists Turner Classic Movies showed a 31-minute short from 1955 called 24 Hour Alert, produced by Cedric Francis, directed by Robert M. Leeds, and starring Jack Webb in a bizarre propaganda tale about the Cold War and in particular the defenses against a sneak attack by a foreign power (carefully unnamed in the Beirne Lay, Jr./Richard L. Breen script, but any 1955 audience member would have known they meant the Soviet Union) the U.S. Air Force had instituted. Webb introduces himself in the same laconic, understated way in which he proclaimed his identity as Sgt. Joe Friday on the iconic TV show Dragnet. In fact, it was Dragnet that had brought him to Warner Bros. in the first place: they signed him to do a feature-film version of the show, which my husband Charles and I watched years ago on a VHS home tape. I remember that when Webb as Friday referenced an “eyeball witness” in the dialogue, both Charles and I immediately thought of the same joke: “What did the ‘eyeball witness’ see the eyeball doing?” Anyway, 24 Hour Alert had an intriguing set of production company credits: Warner Bros., Mark VII (Webb’s production company), the U.S. Air Force, and Walt Disney Productions (though since the film doesn’t contain any animated sequences, Disney’s role is unclear). Its basic message is an attack on the NIMBY’s (“Not In My Back Yard”) who were challenging the Air Force’s network of bases in semi-urban areas and asking them to move. The story is set in a smallish town called “Millville” whose mayor, Hogan (Walter Sande), is dead set against the Air Force base in or just outside Millville. He’s getting plenty of complaints from the local residents, mostly about the noise the planes at the base are making – especially when they cross the speed of sound and emit loud, nerve-shattering sonic booms.

The main plane seen here is the U.S. Air Force’s first supersonic fighter plane to go faster than sound without an assist from another plane taking it aloft (as the various X-series experimental planes had to have to cross the sound barrier), though we also get to see earlier jet fighters like the F-86, which couldn’t go supersonic but was still America’s workhorse fighter in the then recently-concluded Korean War. Many of the planes seen in the film carry the designation “F-U” before the registration numbers on their noses, which was probably considered unobjectionable then but seems almost hilarious in its naïveté today. The mayor of Millville, along with one of the town’s City Councilmembers, fly a private, propeller-driven plane to Washington, D.C. to lobby the Air Force to move the base out of Millville after various noise complaints from Millvillians, including some from a chinchilla farmer who complains that the noise from the jets is waking up the chinchillas and making them unhealthy. As luck would have it, on his way back his plane is trapped in a fog that makes it virtually impossible to land, especially since its radio has failed and thereby cut out its pilot’s ability to communicate with ground control. No problem: the Air Force base commander sends up a plane to signal the pilot of the mayor’s plane visually and guide it in for a safe landing. Mayor Hogan is so grateful that he immediately reverses his position on whether the base should remain open in Millville, but a number of City Councilmembers who didn’t have his experience of the Air Force’s beneficence still want to see the base moved. Webb, his old Army Air Corps World War II buddy Col. Jim Breech (Art Ballinger), and others in the operation of the base work out the idea of hosting a big festival featuring stunt flyers and the Air Force’s latest cool hardware to ease public opposition, and of course it works. Much of the last third of the film consists of stunning footage of Air Force planes flying in formation, and even earlier than that we’ve seen a scene in which an Air Force fighter manages to bump the defective landing gear of a B-25 bomber into place so the B-25 can land safely: an amazing feat of precision flying. 24 Hour Alert is a fascinating souvenir of a time when most Americans basically trusted their government to do what was right for them, and its message is that sonic booms and the accompanying lost hours of sleep are a small price to pay for protecting our “freedom” against the evil people and nations who want to take it away.