Airport ’77 (1977)

(In French, On TV, November 2021) By 1977, both the Airport series and the disaster-movie subgenre had evolved to make the existence of a ludicrous film like Airport ’77 inevitable. While the first Airport was an ensemble melodrama enlivened with some techno-thriller elements, the success of its imitators focused on the thrills and by the time the follow-ups came around, the drama was clearly an accessory to the spectacle, although it allowed some Classic Hollywood superstars one last go at box-office gold. So it is that one of the two most engaging elements of Airport ’77 is James Stewart, with a relatively small role as the owner of an airline—so proud of his newest plane that he loads it up with invaluable treasures right before it’s set to travel from New York to the Caribbean, with none other than Jack Lemmon playing the plane’s pilot. But this wouldn’t be a disaster without a disaster, and so thieves drug the passengers, steal the valuables and make a dumb mistake that sends the plane crashing into the ocean and settling down a few metres down the surface. The other asset of the film kicks in at that point — a relatively credible description of how such a disaster would be tackled by the US Navy (with some assistance from series mascot George Kennedy), slipping large balloons underneath the wings of the plan to raise it up to the surface so that passengers can be rescued. (Let’s all agree to ignore the extremely high likelihood of the plane breaking up upon hitting the ocean in the first place.)  Stewart, Lemmon and the US Navy don’t quite add up to a completely enjoyable film, but they do help rescue it from disaster. I don’t necessarily count the unlikeliness of the plotting against Airport ’77 — it’s a disaster film, after all. But there’s still too much dead weight, too many bog-standard subplots, and too little of a climax to cap things off. It fits with the other films of the series… even if the steady drop-off in quality becomes more and more obvious.