Popcorn 'N Roses

DISASTER BLASTER: "Bette....WE'RE TOO LOW!"

THIS WEEK'S BLASTER: AIRPORT 1975

STARS: CHARLTON HESTON, KAREN BLACK, GEORGE KENNEDY, CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, EFRAM ZIMBALIST JR, SUSAN CLARK, LINDA BLAIR, HELEN REDDY, GLORIA SWANSON, DANA ANDREWS
DIRECTOR: JACK SMIGHT

Each and every week in "DISASTER BLASTER", I turn the spotlight on a movie from my favorite schlock genre!

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Continuing our analysis of the AIRPORT series, we're up to the second movie in the series, and by far one of the biggest celebrations of unintentional camp in cinematic history...

Because I knew I was getting ready to write about them, I recently purchased the "Airport TERMINAL Pack", a collection of all four Airport movies on DVD. It has been years since I've seen Airport 1975 uncut and unedited for television. Let me tell you, it was a TRIP...

In this sequel, the plane collides mid-flight with a small plane who's pilot has a heartattack while in flight. He crashes into the jumbo jet right above the cockpit 1/3 of the way through the movie, sucking co-pilot Roy Thinnes out the hole the impact made, killing engineer Erik Estrada, and leaving pilot Efram Zimbalist Jr without any sight.  It's up to head stewardess Karen Black to pilot the plane as they try to approach Salt Lake City for an emergency landing...through mountains, even...

Lucky for us, Black's boyfriend is TransGlobal chief pilot instructor Charlton Heston, who spends the movie wringing his hands and grimacing a lot. You see, he and Black had an argument right before Flight 409 took off, and now he's feeling guilty about it. He called her on the plane right before the accident and tried to make things right.  Now he and TransGlobal chief engineer George Kennedy (as Joe Patroni, the only character to appear in all four movies), wing their way to Salt Lake from LA trying to meet the plane. Kennedy's wife and son are on board the plane as well, coming back from New York after a week of shows and such.

This movie is overacted so much it has become known as one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies of it's day. The 70s fashions are bad enough (check out TransGlobal's gnarly purple color scheme, from the planes, to the uniforms, to the corporate offices...um, but then again...I should talk, I guess...), but the dialogue...ROTFL!

Black's performance is so hammy it landed her on the cover of a recent coffeetable book about 70's movies, "The Stewardess Is Flying The Plane" (a line uttered during the movie by Sid Caesar). Heston eats more scenary and grits his teeth a lot. And finally, they decide to try and put a pilot through the hole in the cockpit to land the plane.  As they approach the plane in the helicopter that's coming to the rescue, when the would-be rescuers first spot it, Black has taken the controls herself after the radio has died and she can't hear the tower anymore and is flying the plane up because as the article title says, "We're too low" - there's a 11,000 foot mountain right in front of them.  Chuck grimaces and grits his teeth some more, and grunts "Climb baby climb!" And she does, and you can see the mountain that they just barely miss going underneath them on the blue screen they're flying over...

And when the first attempt to put someone in the plane fails, of course Chuck dons the gear and gets in as the "hero" always does, and manages to land the plane safely.

I feel for the people in this movie. It WAS a box office hit, but it was a hideous "final movie" for the legendary Gloria Swanson to leave as her legacy. In this movie, she has a huge acting challenge too..she has to play....Gloria Swanson. That's right, she plays HERSELF in the movie, flying back to LA from New York after meeting with her publisher.  Helen Reddy, in her first american acting role (and unfortunately not her last) is on board as a singing Nun (boy will She get a kick out of that...and if you don't know who "SHE" is, then you aren't a child of the 70s or a fan of Reddy's), who sings a saccharine little song to dialysis patient Linda Blair (fresh from her head-turning performance in "The Exorcist").  Poor Dana Andrews, another legend, is toast too...he's the poor sap who had the heartattack and started this whole chain of events in the first place...

And Christopher Norris...could someone please tell me why HER parents named HER "Christopher"? I have never gotten this. This was one of Ms. Norris' first featured roles, and she would later become known as a co-star on "Trapper John MD" and several soaps, but I've never understand why SHE is named with a boy's name...it's always bugged me...

In any case, Airport 1975 is by far the most laughable of the four ("The Concorde: Airport '79" is NOT laughable, just PAINFUL...more on that one in two weeks) and as a result can be a lot of fun for people to sit and rip on. The sexist 70s dialogue, the horrible color schemes and fashions, and the performances of the many passengers on board (including Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy, Conrad Janis, Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, et al) are all a hoot to watch.  The movie also claims in the credits that Sharon Gless is in this movie, but in all the times I've watched, I have yet to actually SEE her. Perhaps she was one of the Stewardesses, I don't know, but she apparently plays someone named "Sharon", and apparently (at least to me) this "Sharon" is invisible...

Director Jack Smight never really did another big hit after this one - he followed it up with a two more mid-70s disaster/war movies, Midway (IN "SENSURROUND!") and Damnation Alley.

Truly the best thing about the movie is its score. For some reason, I have always loved the theme music from this movie, and I don't know why. It's just very cool "beautiful music" , a classic-style movie theme. It's a pity more people don't remember it's great theme...it deserved to be a movie music classic as is the theme from the original "Airport".

All in all, despite all of its many flaws, Airport 1975 is actually quite an enjoyable movie. Most people are probably NOT enjoying it in QUITE the way that the filmmakers intended the audience to enjoy it, but what the hell...as LONG as they're enjoying it, who cares?

NEXT TIME: PART THREE OF THE "AIRPORT" SERIES - "AIRPORT '77"

DISASTER BLASTER: The one that started it all...

THIS WEEK'S BLASTER: AIRPORT

STARS: BURT LANCASTER, DEAN MARTIN, JACQUELINE BISSET, HELEN HAYES, JEAN SEBURG, VAN HEFLIN
DIRECTOR: GEORGE SEATON

Each and every week in "DISASTER BLASTER", I turn the spotlight on a movie from my favorite schlock genre!

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Airport was the movie that started it all. No, it WASN'T the first movie of it's kind - The High And The Mighty and Zero Hour (also based on a bestseller by Airport author Arthur Hailey) came first. But it was the one that really lit up box office dynamite, and commanded attention at that year's Oscar ceremony. Nominated for ten Academy awards, including best picture, best adapted screenplay, and a host of other awards, it managed to snag only one, for Helen Hayes as Best Supporting Actress, and she was competing against another cast member, Maureen Stapleton. Even that was pretty good, because Patton steamrolled over most of the other competition.

The story is set in primarily Chicago, which is being hit by a major blizzard. Airport manager Mel Bakersfeld (Lancaster) has to deal with a host of problems, both professional and personal. As the movie starts, an airliner turns too quickly as it lands and ends up mired in the mud, it's tail sticking out across runway two-niner, the airport's longest runway.  While Mel calls in TransGlobal rival TWA's top problem jockey, Joe Patroni (played by George Kennedy in all four Airport movies, the only character to move from one movie to another), his by-the-book pilot brother-in-law Vern (Martin) is on TransGlobal's Rome flight that night. Just prior to departure, Vern finds out that his stewardess girlfriend/mistress Gwen (Bisset) is pregnant. Mel's associate Tanya Livingston (Seburg) has to deal with a crafty elderly lady, Mrs. Quonset (Hayes) who has a habit of stowing away on a flight when she wants to visit her daughter in New York.  Meanwhile, in a run down apartment building in Chicago, a down on his luck contractor named Guerrero (Heflin) plans to board TGA's Rome flight with a bomb in his briefcase, trying to get the insurance money for his devoted wife (Stapleton)....

All these stories, and several others, coalesce aboard the "Golden Argosy" flight to Rome, and the discovery of a possible bomber on board, sitting right next to Mrs. Quonset, who managed to give Mrs Livingston the slip and get on board using the old "My son just went on board and he dropped his wallet" routine...

It's up to Vern, his co-pilot, and the crew to try and get the plane back to Chicago safely, which gets a bit dicey once the bomber discovers he's been found out, and just as Vern has almost talked him into giving up the bomb, someone comes out of the can behind him, one of the passengers yells "STOP HIM, HE'S GOT A BOMB!", and Guerrero, desperate and now facing a life in prison, jumps into the can, locks the door, and pulls the detonator...

Airport is the first, and easily the best, of Universal's Airport series, and boasts fine performances all around. Hayes won an Oscar for her portrayal of Mrs. Quonset, and it's easy to see why - she's brilliant in the role of the crafty, but still loveable, grandmotherly type.

Interestingly, despite it's success at the box office, Burt Lancaster didn't think much of what I still feel was one of his best roles. He has been quoted as saying this about the movie:"I don't know why it was made. It's the biggest piece of junk ever made."

Maybe, but it's ENTERTAINING junk, and it's filled with fun, soap-opera intrigue, and what I still feel was the biggest and best role of Dean Martin's career.

Airport begat three sequels as noted above, each carrying the year of their release: Airport 1975 (actually released November 1974), Airport '77, and The Concorde:Airport '79.  Of the sequels, which we'll be covering here soon, '77 is the best, featuring outstanding performances by Jack Lemmon, Darren McGavin, Lee Grant, and Christopher Lee among the cast. Karen Black's performance as the lead stewardess in '75 has been singled out by many as one of the campiest performances in history, and even inspired the title of a recent book on 70s movies, The Stewardess Is Flying The Plane (a great trip through memory lane, if anyone is interested -- well worth the money), and her mug is front and center on the cover. But by '79, the plots had worn thin, and we're forced to deal with George Kennedy's Joe Patroni as the pilot this time (in previous films he was a mechanic and a troubleshooter) and a Love Boat-esque cast including, among others, Robert Wagner, Avery Schreiber, John Davidson, and Charo....

But Airport was the real start of what became known as the disaster movie, a genre onto itself, especially in the 70s with great movies like The Poseidon Adventure (which has been remade twice - once for TV, once for theatres, this year) and The Towering Inferno (both mulitple Oscar nominees) mixed in with lower class cheaply made movies like Tidal Wave (an americanized version of Japan's biggest grossing movie to that date, The Submersion of Japan, with Lorne Greene) and Avalanche. And along the way, there have been plenty more, as many as both feature films and TV could provide.

In 1996, after a number of years without any major studio disaster movies, Hollywood rediscovered the disaster genre with the huge success of Twister, and hasn't looked back. There's been no lack of product in recent years, with Dante's Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armegeddon, The Core, and The Day  After Tomorrow just to name a few. So over the months ahead, i'm not going to be lacking for movies to take a look at, that's for sure...and with Wolfgang Petersen's remake Poseidon only three months away from release (it hits theatres in mid-May), this summer could revitalize the genre once again.

Rumors have been swirling for some time that Universal is thinking about Airport being ripe for a remake, but we'll see. And even if it is, they have some HUGE shoes to fill...