Although The Poseidon Adventure gets all the credit, Airport is the film that really kicked off the 70s disaster craze. Unlike its three follow-ups, this adaptation of Arthur Hailey's doorstop novel really is as much about the snowbound airport as it is the imperilled plane, one of many plots the movie juggles. Hailey had built his novel around a 1956 Canadian TV movie he wrote called Flight Into Danger, but much of it plays like a Peyton Place-esquire soap opera: will embattled airport manager Burt Lancaster stay married to Dana Wynter or to his job - or will he go off into the sunrise with that nice airline rep Jean Seberg? Will pilot Dean Martin leave his wife now he's got stewardess Jacqueline Bisset up the duff? Will Helen Hayes' scene-stealing geriatric stowaway get caught? Will George Kennedy clear the blocked runway in time to avoid tragedy? Will Van Heflin's mentally troubled demolitions expert set off the bomb in his briefcase? Would there be a movie if he didn't?
Shot like an epic to emphasise the size and scale of everything (it even opens with an overture of sound effects of a busy airport terminal before bursting into Alfred Newman's urgent rumba-led score) it's a big, glossy well crafted entertainment that still holds up surprisingly well, especially in widescreen where the occasional split-screen effects come into their own (not to mention a great gag with a priest and an annoying passenger during the crash landing that's usually lost in the TV panning-and-scanning). It's the least sensational of the series but still the most effective, and there's no shortage of familiar faces in the passenger seats, from Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Jesse Royce Landis, Whit Bissell and the original "Jimmy Bond 007" of the CIA, Barry Nelson. Sadly, setting something of an unfortunate pattern for the series, the 707 used in the film crashed in 1989, somewhat disproving the constant accolades the plane's abilities receive throughout the film ("The only thing a 707 can't do is read!").
It wasn't until the 70s disaster movie craze was well under way that Universal got round to a sequel to its 1970 blockbuster Airport - largely because the lucrative profits deals Lancaster and Martin secured on the first film made reassembling the original cast impractical (though George Kennedy did return to provide a vague fig leaf of continuity). It wasn't until producer Jennings Lang came across a script intended as a TV movie that some bright spark thought of slapping the Airport brand on it, adding 1975 to the title and abandoning the actual Airport aspect to concentrate on the planes in jeopardy instead.
The result, Airport 1975 (actually released in 1974) is the other movie that Airplane! lampooned mercilessly, what with sick transplant patients, Hare Krishnas and singing nuns among the passengers, not to mention Charlton Heston in safari suit and shades providing the blueprint for Robert Stack's Rex Kramer and Gloria Swanson in the kind of comeback role that could have been written by Joe Gillis for Norma Desmond (although it was supposedly intended for Garbo). In fact, Swanson wrote her own anecdote-filled dialogue, and boy does it show - this isn't a part, it's a chat show appearance.
Swanson isn't the only star of yesteryear bulking up the cast, with Myrna Loy knocking back several boilermakers, Sid Caesar providing the odd wisecrack while Dana Andrews, every drink he ever took etched onto his face, gets his own back for Effrem Zimbalist crashing into his plane in The Crowded Sky by crashing into Zimbalist's 747 this time round, leaving stewardess Karen Black to fly the plane until Chucky baby comes to the rescue, taking off his shades for a midair transfer that's a mixture of daring stuntwork and pitiful backprojection. Yet it's surprisingly entertaining, superbly photographed by veteran Philip Lathrop, much better directed by Jack Smight than it has any right to be and, as the shortest entry in the series at 107 minutes, keeps things tight enough not to leave too much room to dwell on the absurdities. Well, almost: if ever there was a moment where Linda Blair projectile vomiting on a member of the cloth was not just absolutely justifiable but positively mandatory it's when Helen Reddy sings about her best friend being herself, but sadly Linda doesn't deliver the pea soup on this occasion. But while we may scoff today, Jennings Lang knew what he was doing - no singing nun movie has ever lost money at the box-office, and the film was a big enough hit to guarantee two more sequels with considerably bigger budgets, though not before, in one of those nasty ironies the series is prone to, Dana Andrews' light aircraft in the film really was destroyed in a mid-air collision in 1975. Oh, and if the midair footage looks familiar, that's because Universal recycled it for years, most memorably in the 747 episode of The Incredible Hulk TV series.
Airport '77 has the best pitch of the series, though it never quite makes enough of it: this time a private plane filled with art treasures and millionaire passengers (it's so high-tech it even has an optical video disc player!) en route to the opening of James Stewart's new museum are hijacked by art thieves. Just to add to their woes, while flying low to avoid radar they crash into an oil rig and end up submerged on an unstable ocean ledge in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle while the 747 does a very bad impersonation of a submarine. Since the Navy can't lower the ocean, the only thing to do is to raise the Titanic - sorry, raise the Jumbo Jet...
Unfortunately it never quite makes enough of it, with so much time setting up the plot and the characters that the movie's half over before the plane hits the water and there's less time for plot twists or surprises than you'd like. It doesn't help that, hijackers aside, the passengers are a generally likable bunch of old Hollywood and beloved TV stars - Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon), Dracula (Christopher Lee), Kolchak (Darren McGavin), Hooky from Zulu (James Booth), Rick Deckard's boss (M. Emmett Walsh), Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard), Scarlet O'Hara's rival (Olivia De Havilland) and the guy who fingered Harry Lime (Joseph Cotton) among them - with only Christopher Lee's saintly marine biologist and his drunk wife Lee Grant offering much in the way of dramatic conflict. Still, despite a few plot holes (you'd think someone from the oil rig they crashed into would report it) it passes the time professionally enough and it's hard to dislike. None of the deleted footage from the extended TV version is included on the disc, nor is the 10-minute making of featurette, with the theatrical trailer the only extra.
"Oh, you pilots are such men." "They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey." Dialogue like that is just one of many reasons why The Concorde... Airport '79 (or, if you saw it in the UK where it dragged its heels getting released there, Airport '80: The Concorde) was the last and by far the least of the series. The disaster movie was in dire straits in the late 70s, what with The Swarm having offered much unintentional hilarity and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out and City on Fire simply offering much boredom, and the desperation to find a new spin on the genre is all too apparent here. This time it's a conspiracy plot, with Susan Blakely's news anchorwoman discovering billionaire boyfriend Robert Wagner has been selling arms to terrorists and the North Vietnamese. Naturally, she decides to tell him everything rather than make the story public, but, he fobs her off by explaining "I'm a very rich man. I have everything in life I could ever want. Why would I jeopardise that by doing something so incredibly stupid?" Just in case she doesn't buy that line, rather than, say hire a hit-man to kill her on the ground, he decides to do things the smart way by planning to destroy the Concorde while she's flying to Moscow via Paris. "I've done a lot of things I've been ashamed of, but I am not a murderer," he insists indignantly on his way to reprogramme a guided missile to destroy the plane. So, nothing incredibly stupid there. And when that fails, he sends a jet fighter after it. And when that fails...
Don't even think of looking for anything resembling logic here: this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that even the studio gave up on and marketed as a comedy in the US after critics laughed it off the screen. Where the previous three entries all had the look of glossy big-budget entertainments, this small-screen friendly effort (the only one not to be shot in 2.35:1 widescreen) doesn't even manage to make the Concorde look good, which is quite a feat. TV veteran David Lowell Rich presumably got the directing gig because he was fast, cheap and had previously directed TV movie SST: Disaster in the Sky where Peter Graves' supersonic airplane found itself unable to land due to sabotage and Senegalese flu (which was not, intentionally at least, a comedy despite the presence of a young Billy Crystal in the cast) and seemed like the natural choice for what looks like a $14m TV movie that somehow escaped into theatres when no-one was looking.
Cast like a bad episode of Hollywood Squares, stars are in very short supply this time round, and most of the few vaguely familiar faces seem to have been rounded up from rehab clinics and busted sitcoms. Alain Delon gives the Hollywood career that one last shot as the pilot, "Happy Fish" (don't ask) George Kennedy moves from the executive suite to the co-pilot's seat in the hope of reminding people of the other movies, while the rest of the ensemble includes a couple of veterans of The Towering Inferno (Wagner and Blakely), a soft-porn star (Sylvia Kristel, trying to go respectable), an Ingmar Bergman regular (Bibi Andersson - and she's the one playing the hooker!), David Warner's navigator on a diet having nightmares about being chased by bananas, the voice of the Devil (Mercedes McCambridge), Charo and her Seeing Eye Chihuahua ("Dohn miscon-screw me"), Martha Raye and her weak bladder, Jimmie Walker playing the sax in his seat and smoking weed in the john (in the few moments its not occupied by Martha Raye), Cicely Tyson kissing her credibility goodbye as the obligatory mother with critically ill child and a frozen heart in the overhead locker, airline owner Eddie Albert and trophy wife Sybil Danning occupying the best seat in the house, Ed Begley Jr in goggles, and the Russian Olympic team and their lovable coach Val Avery and his deaf daughter (ahhhh!) on a goodwill tour of the States (who knew about the boycott?). Just to add a touch of The Simpsons to proceedings, Harry Shearer voices one news report in the same tones he'd later use for Smithers.
Highlight? Despite the impromptu wedding ceremony during a crash landing, it just has to be George Kennedy diverting a heat-seeking missile by opening the window, sticking his arm out (at nearly twice the speed of sound!) and firing a flare - while the plane is upside down! And then Alain Delon turns off the engines so there won't be a "heat source" for the missiles to home in on... Yes, someone actually got paid for writing this, and that someone was future Oscar winner and screenwriter of Munich and The Insider Eric Roth (hey, everybody has to start somewhere), although in his defence it was producer Jennings Lang who came up with the plot. Still, what do you expect from a film that credits stunt balloonists and ends with a shot of the Concorde flying off into the sunset? Amazingly, in one of those won't admit defeat moments studios used to be prone to, Universal shot another 20 minutes or so of footage a couple of years later to include in the network TV showings (not included on the DVD). Sadly its box-office failure led to the fifth entry in the series, the laugh-riot that would have been Airport 1984: UFO, never getting off the ground. Even more genuinely tragically, it was the Concorde used in this film that crashed in France 21 years later.
(Oh, and if you're wondering what Charo says to her Chihuahua in unsubtitled Spanish when it's not allowed on board, it's "What do you think? Don't worry. When the revolution comes, I promise you will fly on anything you want. I promise. What a shame, my love. What do they think they are?")
The only extras are the original trailers, but all four films have good transfers in their original widescreen ratios. |
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