Fasten your seatbelts, kids......it's going to be bumpy flight! Grab your boarding passes, neck pillows and 3 oz. bottles of shampoo, cause this trip lasts the entirety of the 1970's......
First destination....
Airport (1970)
For producer Ross Hunter, slick purveyor of glossy, glitzy technicolor'd crowd-pleasers ("Imitation of Life", "Magnificent Obsession", "Pillow Talk") this one became his Magnum Opus and a roaring box-office success.
Consider this an amazing feat, given that 1970 continued the enormous upheavals in the cinema arts, with a youthquake of fresh new taboo breaking filmmakers, audiences and a studio system crumbling faster than ever.
Writer-director George Seaton smoothly scripted and directed this polished-to-a-shine soap opera based on Arthur Hailey's bestseller about a barely averted airline disaster. And Ross Hunter filled up the cast with as many stars and familiar faces as he could lay his hands on. Besides reigning superstars Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, you could also spot a pile of 'Hey! Isn't that....?' beloved characters actors in every supporting role.
Lancaster's the harried airport manager multitasking through multiple crises in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Martin's the footloose pilot with a wife he's tired of and a devoted stewardess (Jacqueline Bissett) he's impregnated. Everyone's got marital woes, including a poor sad waitress (Maureen Stapleton) whose depressed, anguished husband (Van Heflin) has boarded the plane with a bomb in hopes of getting her a huge life insurance settlement.
We can't even begin to catalog the many little side stories unfolding among the corny, but vividly drawn players here.....(including reliable George Kennedy as gruff but lovable Chief airport engineer Joe Patroni, Helen Hayes as a sly geriatric stowaway, and Jean Seberg as Lancaster's loyal assistant and budding mistress.) George Seaton and Ross Hunter assemble the whole package together with that sparkling glaze of Hollywood studio product, a throwback to the kind of movie all of America flocked to in the 30's, 40's and 50's.
Call it corny and obvious all you like, but lots of people found themselves thoroughly entertained by its old fashioned professionalism and eager-to-please attitude. (That forceful driving music score from Alfred Newman was more icing on the cake....)
Come to think of it....we loved all its retro charms too. 4 stars (****).
Check to see if your life preservers are under the seats, 'cause it's a straight plunge downward from here on......
Airport 1975 (1974)
And now we come to the shameless cash grabs as Universal Studios began to squeeze those cash cow udders and glide to more big buckolas by hopping on the wings of 'Airport's enormous success.
Naturally bigger and better disasters were needed to befall this airplane.....(something more cinematic than a distraught Van Heflin exploding himself out of the plane's toilet)
The subsequent 'Airport' sequels were each stand-alone stories unrelated to (but 'inspired by') the Arthur Hailey novel. As a touchstone connecting them, only George Kennedy's 'Joe Patroni' airline tech appears in the next three films (though his job, backstory and screen time change in each one).
Universal bigwig Jennings Lang took over producing the rest of the series......this mogul certainly didn't lack instincts for showmanship and spectacle, but he didn't much care how ridiculous and unintentionally funny the results might turn out.
In that regard, 'Airport 1975', steeped in literally overblown hilarious melodramatics, caricature performances and playing like its own 107 minute blooper reel, became an instant prime target to lampooning. Mercilessly mocked, much of it became the inspiration for the no-holds-barred spoofery of 1980's 'Airplane' comedy.
Karen Black, the most over-employed, ubiquitous leading actress of the 1970's plays the plucky, stalwart stewardess who's forced to fly a 747 after a small plane swipes a jumbo hole in its cockpit, sucking out the poor co-pilot and severely injuring the pilot. Desperately talking her through the '747-For-Dummies' instructions are boyfriend Charlton Heston....which, as you might imagine, doesn't much comfort the passengers who scream out, "The stewardess is flying the plane!!"
And speaking of the passengers, what a ripe for satire bunch was on board here. There's Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller and Conrad Janis as three drunks who can't hope to compete with elderly Myrna Loy chugging whiskey-and-beer boilermakers......a singing nun (pop singer Helen Reddy) serenading a gravely ill little girl awaiting a much needed kidney (played by Linda Blair, minus the 360 head rotations). And let's not forget comedian Sid Caesar and best of all Gloria Swanson, stretching her range to play.....Gloria Swanson.
And all you nailbiters, prepare yourselves for breathless scenes where Heston, unable to part oncoming mountains like Moses, tries lowering himself into the cockpit as he's tethered to a helicopter flying along side the plane......
Yes, it's all as foolish and funny as it sounds, but moviegoers lapped it up for the major hoot that it was, prompting.......get a grip on your armrests....yet another 'Airport' movie. But 'Airport 1975' in its own goofy way, became a perfect emblem of bloated, clueless Big Studio product of the 70's.
We still smiled all the way through it. 3 Guilty Pleasure stars (***).
Now hold tight to your styrofoam noodles....we're about to go from in-flight to a really deep dip in the pool......the Bermuda Triangle...
Airport '77 (1977)
Little or no pleasure to be had here, guilty or otherwise. This third entry, connect-the-dots dreary, plods along with the usual Universal machine tooled efficiency and by the time it's done (and the last cast member rescued), you wonder why you watched it all.
Jack Lemmon's on hand to pick up an easy paycheck as our pilot and his plane's hijacked by thieves after a priceless art collection on board. They gas Lemmon and the passengers into sleepy-bye, and try steering the plane toward some island to unload the goods. But oopsie, in the fog they clip an oil rig and go crashing into the ocean. The plane sinks into the drink, putting everybody in danger of going glug glug before any rescue effort can even find them. Cue the 'who's-gonna-live-or-go-belly-up' survival sweepstakes.
For star gazers, there's Joseph Cotton, Olivia de Havilland and Christopher Lee (in a rare sympathetic role.) At least the always superb Lee Grant gets some jollies tearing through her role as an obnoxious shrew you just know is destined for the terminal list. The rest of cast are talented enough folks, but generally not very interesting minor leaguers.
A blah 2 star (**) waste of time, this one. Even George Kennedy's Patroni is hardly in it, as if he saw the script in advance.
Clutch those little bags of pretzels, everyone.....here comes the worst fight of all.....
The Concorde...Airport '79 (1979)
We could almost believe the rumor that Universal, embarrassed and shamed by this last entry, tried marketing it as a comedy.....(but that ploy would've only worked well with 'Airport 1975')
Stupid beyond belief and clumsily plotted, it's fitting the final 'Airport' plane was a Concorde, a supersonic gas guzzler, larger and faster than Rodan on the hunt for Mothra. This behemoth was so expensive to service and maintain, tickets had to cost $30,000 a seat to help pay for its upkeep. (One of the last of these horribly crashed, killing all on board and four on the ground.....so the Concorde followed the Tyrannosaurus straight into the tar pits...)
An international flavor to the cast enlivens things a little. French superstar Alain Delon, tried breaking into American cinema as one of the pilots, but it's a nothing role for him and he does nothing with it.....not even when he's romancing ultra-hottie Sylvia Kristel, soon to cavort naked through multiple soft core 'Emmanuelle' sex romps.
The cast line-up is all over the place...plenty of familiar TV faces like Eddie Albert, Susan Blakely, Avery Schreiber, Martha Raye, John Davidson, Jimmy "J.J. Walker and God help us, Charo. And some quality folk pop up too.....David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge, Bibi Andersson, and Cicely Tyson.
Robert Wagner's a scummy corporate CEO and secret arms dealer whose nasty secret's discovered by the reporter he's romancing (Blakely). So much for love....Wagner re-programs his spiffy new combat drone to blow up the Concorde while Blakely and the rest of the cast is aboard and in flight.
Fear not! Our trusty new pilot is.....none other than George Kennedy's good old Joe Patroni. But evidently a Patroni from an alternate universe since Joe 2.0 suddenly has an extensive background as a veteran combat pilot with Vietnam experience. Avoiding the relentless drone, Joe steers the massive plane into 360 barrel roles, taking the entire cast on one crazy Six Flags ride after another.
You'd think the passengers would've had enough of the Concorde after Joe manages to land the plane in Paris, almost hurling off the runway before it's caught in a safety net. Are you kidding? Get real, this is an Airport movie. Off they go again to complete their flight to the Moscow Olympics, conveniently forgetting they spent the first half of the trip rolling upside down. Way to compartmentalize, guys......
But scumbag Wagner, still afraid Blakely will spill the beans on him, has a mechanic rig the cargo hold door to open in flight.......which of course it does, not only ripping gaping tears in the plane's floor, but sending the cabin into that passenger favorite, the 360 funhouse roll. (A special Little Dutch Boy award to Eddie Albert, whose seat, with him in it, gets jammed into one of the holes.)
It's up to our hero, Joe 2.0 to save the day by skirting over the Alps to find a long, long patch of snow he can safely plow the Concorde into without ramming the Matterhorn.
Don't get too excited thinking you'll laugh yourself silly at all of this as much as "Airport 1975". The film simply lacks that kind of dopey energy and the cast members only dutifully perform their tasks so as to pick up their checks and go home. So Universal's Hail Mary to market the film as a farce could only make everyone think they'd lost their minds.
One amazing credit did, in fact, stagger us - the script for this rambling circus came from Eric Roth.....the screenwriter of 'Killers of the Flower Moon', 'Dune Part One', 'Munich', 'The Horse Whisperer' and Forrest Gump'. Huh??? Well, everyone has to start somewhere......
1 star (*) (for those barrel rolls only).
BQ thanks you for flying with us and hope to see you again soon......maybe to cover movies where everyone stays on the ground.......
