Blue Sky

The multi-award winning BLUE SKY was director Tony Richardson’s final film and although completed in 1991 it was left to collect dust on the shelf until 1994 due to the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures. Jessica Lange won numerous accolades (including a Golden Globe and an Academy Award) for her performance as the mentally unstable wife of a US Major who gets drawn into the nasty world of a nuclear cover-up.

During the opening sequence we see multiple magazine covers depicting glamorous female movie stars from the 1950s (the story is set in the early 1960s) and it soon becomes evident that Carly Marshall (J. Lange), the attractive wife of Major Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones) – a nuclear engineer and devoted military man – fancies herself as a bit of a starlet, forever trying to copy her favourite actresses both in look and behaviour. This explains Carly’s flirtatious nature and the urge to show off her figure and dancing skills whenever she can, resulting in the Marshall family being ‘transferred’ to a remote testing facility in Alabama after Hank’s superior makes it clear that the Major’s wife is disgracing the US Army with her unseemly behaviour. Things soon go from bad to worse when Carly throws a tantrum upon arrival in the new military base – a bleak settlement of joyless houses and their latest ‘home’ left in an untidy state by the previous tenants. So angry and frustrated gets Carly that she starts smashing some of the furniture before jumping into the car and driving off in a rage while Hank and their two teenage daughters Alex (Amy Locane) and Becky (Anna Klemp) helplessly look on. Chasing after her in a military-owned jeep (the one Carly had crashed into minutes earlier) Hank has his hands full trying to restrain his wife (who by now has entered a clothes store) and take her back to their new lodgings with everyone looking on.

Despite his best efforts and a massive understanding for his wife’s mental illness (one must wonder how the pair ever got together in the first place) nothing gets any easier for Hank: his first meeting with his new base commander Colonel Vince (Powers Boothe in suitably sleazy mood) doesn’t fare particularly well due to the fact that Hank falls on deaf ears when he tries to convince Vince that according to scientific support, nuclear underground testing (an initiative code-named ‘Blue Sky’) is considerably safer than the much more controversial above-ground testing. At the other end of the spectrum, Vince’s long-suffering wife Vera (Carrie Snodgress) welcomes Carly to the base and invites her to a party which is organized by the base officer’s wives… who also plan on performing a musical show to entertain the military staff and their families. It’s not before long and Carly makes a nuisance of herself yet again.

During a garden party Hank introduces his family to Colonel Vince who takes an immediate shine to Carly, just as his son Glen (a young Chris O’Donnel coming across like a milksop) seems smitten by Hank’s daughter Alex and the two soon start dating. During another party Vince and Carly are engaged in a rather steamy dance together, with wife Vera calling her husband ‘a pig’ and Hank looking on patiently before an altercation puts a (temporary) end to things. When Alex and Glen’s romance is discovered by the entire base after a dud grenade explodes during a tete-a-tete in a barn, Vince sees all the more reason to get rid of Hank and sends him to a nuclear test site in Nevada where he is to supervise the first test under Colonel Robert ((Michael McClendon). When two ranchers happen to ride in the test area just before the nuclear explosion, Hank tries to convince the Colonel to abort the operation but to no avail.
With Hank out of the way Vince wastes no time in pursuing Carly during a dance rehearsal but disaster looms when the pair are discovered by Alex and Glen (!) in the very same hut they have chosen for their own romantic get-togethers. After a massive row with her mum Alex forces a tearful Carly to ring Hank in Nevada and confess her affair, resulting in a nasty altercation with Vince upon his return during which Carly is accidentally pushed through a window requiring hospitalization. Hank gets arrested for assaulting his superior Vince who now offers Carly the following choices: either Hank will be committed to a psychiatric hospital (where he’s heavily sedated) or he will be court-martialed, meaning eight years prison, his military career over and with no prospect of a pension. Carly opts for the psychiatric clinic but before he is committed Hank tells Carly during a prison visit that Vince’s idea of having Hank transferred to a psychiatric centre is just a set up so he won’t spill the beans about what really happened at the nuclear test site in Nevada.

Realising the mistake she made Carly decides to take matters into her own hands in order to get Hank out of the clinic. Driving across the country with her two daughters she eventually tracks down the two cowboys who unassumingly rode along the test site on that fateful day. It’s clear to Carly that the two ranchers are suffering from advanced radiation sickness but when she begs them to reveal their story to the press they refuse. Later on she steals one of their horses and rides into the test area herself minutes before another explosion is about to be launched – luckily the test gets aborted at the last second and Carly finds herself arrested for stirring up trouble but whaddya know, the real trouble only starts when Carly has all the attention of the press while certain high-ranking military personnel try branding her as a ‘Communist’ and worse but they don’t succeed in their smear campaign against Carly. In the end she and Hank are set free and start a new life in California… but not before Carly decided to dye her blond hair black as she now fancies herself as Elizabeth Taylor...

The acting is magnificent and Lange deservedly won her multiple awards. She has easily the best part which allowed her to act her socks off. Tommy Lee Jones and Powers Boothe are in equally fine form but compared with Lange’s part Lee Jones’ almost fades into a wall. It’s also a very thought-provoking story given the fact that nuclear testing in the Nevada desert was kept under the sandy carpet for years. By the way the story is based on the experiences of screenwriter Rama Laurie Stagner-Blum’s relationship between her parents whilst her father Clyde was in the army.

BLUE SKY is released on Blu-ray with the following bonus material: trailer, image gallery, illustrated booklet, the 1952 short ‘Atoms at Work’ plus the 33min docu ‘Operation Hurricane’ (1952) about the first atomic bomb test on the Monte Bello Islands.