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4
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6 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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There's an old maxim that says if a movie poster has a strip
of headshots boasting of its "all star" cast —
most of 'em washed up TV veterans in between game show appearances
—
then that film is guaranteed to stink. Guess what was on the
original theatrical poster for this baby? Made at the apex of
the Disaster craze of the 1970s, Airport
1975 represents everything wrong with that tritely formulaic
genre. So wrong, in fact, that it's this flick which
served as the template for the wacky comedy lampoon Airplane!,
not the original film in the series, 1970's Airport.
(One of the most undeserving movies ever nominated for a Best
Picture Oscar, by the way.)
The
cornball silliness emanates
from the stock cardboard characters, bad dialog and hammy acting,
not the story. Airport 1975 actually
has one of the more realistic scenarios of any Disaster film.
During a cross-country "red eye" flight from Washington
D.C. to Los Angeles, a commercial 747 jumbo jet is diverted
to Salt Lake City due to heavy fog on the California coast.
Also rerouted to Salt Lake is a small private plane, whose pilot
(The Frozen Dead's
Dana Andrews) happens to suffer a massive heart attack while
at the controls. The twin-engine Beechcraft veers into the path
of Flight 409 and, before the airliner's crew can react, collides
with it. Luckily it's only a glancing blow — a three-foot hole
is ripped in the Boeing's cockpit, sucking out the copilot
and killing the navigator,
yet the jet continues to fly on automatic pilot. 409's captain
is badly injured, however, and totally incapacitated. With a
mountain range dead ahead, the chief stewardess (Karen Black)
has to be instructed via radio on how to maneuver the aircraft.
But then the radio begins to fail, and an Air Force jet scrambled
to visually inspect the airliner spots a major fuel leak. Now,
the only hope of survival left for the people aboard Flight
409 is a dangerous midair transfer... A high-speed chopper will
fly slightly ahead while a pilot, dangling from a tether, enters
the stricken 747 through the tear in the hull. If he makes it
he can then land the plane at the Salt Lake airport before the
fuel runs out. And there's only one man for the job — Moses
himself, Charlton Heston (The
Omega Man, Soylent
Green).
In keeping with the
every-cliché-but-the-kitchen-sink concept,
Heston
and Black's characters are (unconvincing) lovers on the verge
of breaking off their relationship when suddenly thrust into
adversity. The wife and son of airline operations manager Patroni
(the sole character linking all four Airport films, played
by George Kennedy) just happen to be aboard the plane, too.
Pouring gallons of treacly Aunt Jemima over everything is the
post-Exorcist appearance of Linda
Blair as a sick girl being flown to L.A. for a desperately needed
kidney transplant. In the scene most famously (and hilariously)
spoofed in Airplane!, then-popular
singer Helen Reddy —
stunt-cast as a sweet, friendly nun —
plays a guitar and sings to her, stopping the movie dead in
its tracks.
Most of the fun to be had with this clunker
is to play "Spot the Airplane!
Influence" as you watch. That and "Who's Who"
— the cast is heavily populated
with faces that'll be quite familiar to those who grew up watching
American TV in the 1970s. Other
than Charlton Heston, fading as an A-lister but still
a movie star at
that time, it's the kind of roster
you'd see on an ABC TV Movie of the Week. (Chuck should've stayed
with science fiction. After this flick, Earthquake
and Two-Minute Warning
it was all downhill. As the Seventies wore on, Heston's film
choices, like his toupees, got progressively worse.) In fact
the whole film, some aerial shots excepted, has a distinctly
made-for-TV feel to it (i.e, cheap), only it's filmed
for the big screen. Jack Smight's direction is undistinguished
and totally pedestrian. The few special effects are rather lame,
and the film's key action sequence, the helicopter-to-jet transfer,
is completely botched. Where just the roaring rush of the wind
alone would've increased the dramatic tension, instead we get
sappy TV show-quality music. This hardly matters, though; Karen
Black's crazed facial contortions during this scene may have
you laughing too hard to notice! (As a kid I saw Airport
1975 when first released, and yes, the audience cracked
up en masse at her over-the-top mugging.)
Unintentional
humor like that, especially in the wake of Airplane!,
is the only thing worth watching this movie for. It's a big
help if you're in the over-40 crowd, too, for the nostalgia
aspect. The now-astonishingly sexist banter between the the
perpetually horny (not to mention doomed) copilot (Roy Thinnes)
and navigator (Erik Estrada) is a real kicker.
|
| Trivia
Note: Silent screen star Gloria Swanson actually came out of retirement
to do this film — playing silent screen star Gloria Swanson, of
all people — and only succeeded in embarrassing herself. NFL pros
Gene Washington (The
Black Six) and Jim Plunkett are the
other "real life" passengers aboard fictional Flight 409. |
|
|
Universal
has released Airport 1975 as part
of its Airport Terminal Pack "franchise" collection.
All four films in the series — including the original Airport
and the two that followed this one,
Airport 77 and
The Concorde: Airport 79
—
are attractively packaged in a slipcase holding two DVDs. These
are "flipper" discs; i.e., one movie per side. The films
are each presented in their original widescreen aspect ratios
(2.35:1 in the case of 1975), with
good quality audio tracks and optional subtitles. (Airport
is in 5.1 Surround; the rest are 2.0 Mono.) The only extras are
the four theatrical trailers.
As for
Airport 1975, the print is fairly
clean and quite colorful (especially that purple decor!), but
it's a tad grainy and the image appears slightly squeezed at
times. This never really
detracted from the experience, however... It's just a cheesy '70s
disaster film, after all, and the price was certainly right. The
whole shebang goes for under 20 bucks — less than $5 per flick.
(NOTE: My DVD rating of "6" is for the entire four-film set.)
8/09/04 |
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