Airport series

  • Airport ’77 (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Airport (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, July 2021) The big irony about Airport is that even if it’s credited with launching the disaster movie boom of the 1970s, it’s not quite a disaster film through and through: Adapted from a thick procedural novel from the legendary Arthur Hailey, it spends more than an hour and a half detailing the professional and personal struggles of an airport manager during a particularly trying snowstorm. Launching an ensemble cast’s worth of subplots, Airport does gradually build the suspense of its impending disaster, but it remains quite an intimate affair compared to the excesses of its later imitators. For much of the first hour, it remains a remarkably sedate affair. Our airport manager (a solid turn by Burt Lancaster) struggles with a status-seeking wife, a bickering brother-in-law (Dean Martin, playing a playboy pilot), protesting homeowners and that’s all before the film starts, because in the opening moments a pilot error blocks the airport’s main runway even as the snow piles up. Plenty of other subplots are brewing as well — including a charming elderly stowaway (Helen Hayes in an Oscar-winning role), a cigar-chomping maintenance chief tasked with resolving the problem of the stuck plane (George Kennedy in a delightful role — no surprise that he reprised it in the three sequels), and, most crucially, a psychotic engineer with plans to bring down a plane over the Atlantic (Van Heflin in his last role, really not looking as trim as he was twenty years earlier). The all-star ensemble cast is something that other disaster films would reprise with gusto (indeed, watching all four entries in the Airport series is like getting a reunion of classic Hollywood celebrities) even if the formula would eventually be tweaked to bring the disaster earlier in the film. It’s amusing to see the hostile reviews that Airport got upon release, even as it topped the box office for weeks: By 1970, the New Hollywood was getting all of the critical attention, and holdovers like Airport were treated with disdain even as audiences lapped it up. Decades later, Airport’s filmmaking style has become the standard, meaning that it still plays rather well once you get past the slow opening. It’s clear that Airport often gets dinged for the excesses of its successors — the sequels are progressively wilder, cheaper and dumber and that’s not mentioning the other disaster films of the decade—but it’s best seen as a slow-burn suspense film with a still-realistic execution. It’s hardly perfect — the dialogue is often ordinary and there are scenes with as bad a case of “as you know, Bob,” as I can recall seeing—but it’s quite entertaining in its own way, and almost charming in its insistence on sticking to tried-and-true formulas.

  • Airport 1975 (1974)

    Airport 1975 (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2018) The original Airport may have been meant as a workplace drama made even more thrilling by the possibility of airplane crashes, but it launched the 1970s disaster movie craze and by the time its own Airport 1975 follow-up came around, the series refocused on a profitable niche: airborne disasters, in this case what would happen if a small plane crashed in a jumbo airliner? The premise doesn’t make a lot of sense the closer you look at it (or rather: it doesn’t make sense that there would be something to do after such a collision), but no matter: it’s up to George Kennedy and Charlton Heston to play the heroes, be lowered in the gaping open cockpit, and bring everyone back down to safety. That should be enough in itself, but contemporary viewers will get quite a kick out of this Airport 1975 because it’s one of the main sources of inspiration for the classic spoof Airplane! That’s right: the nun, the sick kid and other gags all find their origin here, lending an unintentional hilarity to something meant to be deadly serious. Otherwise, well, some of the airborne footage is impressive, while some of the special effects have not survived well at all. Karen Black is not bad as the heroine, despite her character bearing the brunt of the film’s unconscious sexism. Still, for all its faults, there’s a bit of a magnificence to the results—this is not meant to be a good movie, but it seems to know what it’s made for. As a result, Airport 1975 withstands an admittedly ironic contemporary look better than many of its contemporaries.