More Cheese, Stewardess...

When shag was king, being an airline pilot was the coolest occupation a kid could aspire to. So it may be memories of that childhood icon of the pilot as hero that led us to recently revisit some of the Airport movies.

It might be hard, but if you can put your Airplane! parody goggles on the shelf, it’s fascinating to look at these movies as time-capsules of seventies culture and Hollywood’s endless appetite for sequels.

Little did they know, but Airport (1970) would become the template for the entire burgeoning disaster movie genre. It all began here with pilot Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Burt Lancaster and George Kennedy as cigar-chomping “Joe Patroni,” who appeared in all four films. Pilot Martin’s affair with Bisset’s stewardess has taken an unexpected turn (for them, if not the audience), someone on the plane has a bomb and Kennedy is determined to make anything mechanical do his bidding: “That's one nice thing about the 707. She can do everything but read." Airport is a classic of the era and was always an event when it aired on TV growing up. By far the classiest, least contrived of the series, it was wildly popular and holds up beautifully.

Things really get hopping in Airport 1975, with Charlton Heston in full-on Omega Man mode, aviator shades and leisure suit safari jacket as “Alan Murdock” – now that is a manly name! You’ve got a singing nun, Hare Krishnas and Linda Blair as a transplant patient. But the real reason to scream is when a mid-air collision requires stewardess Karen Black to fly the plane. “THE STEWARDESS IS FLYING THE PLANE!!!” One of the classic disaster movies, it’s over the top, contains a huge amount of the material mocked in Airplane! but really captures the era and never stops trying to entertain.

Airport ‘77 is a kitchen-sink plot explosion featuring Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Stewart, Christopher Lee (as an ineffectual cuckold! Say it ain’t so!), Brenda Vaccaro and Darren McGavin, blustering around like he just walked in from the set of The Night Stalker. Terrorist/robbers take over the plane, which crashes into an off shore oil rig (not another one!!!) sending the plane plunging into…the Bermuda Triangle!!! – which doesn’t really figure into the plot at all, but hey! The survivors are trapped in the sunken fuselage, à la The Poseidon Adventure, their rescue in the hands of a special group of short-shorts wearing Navy commandos who are evidently based out of Fire Island. Billionaire Stewart’s plane is like a private hotel lobby, with no expense spared – there’s even a blind piano player in the bar! Kept waiting for McGavin to suddenly go all Kolchak on Lee (“Wait a minute, you’re Dracula!!!”), but that never happened. Everything else pretty much did!

The series wraps up with The Concorde…Airport ’79, with Alain Delon, blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Charo, evil Robert Wagner and Jimmie Walker. A seemingly endless sight gag is Martha Raye’s charge for the bathroom, evidently gripped by the worst attack of diarrhea in movie history. Even more nausea inducing is John Davidson’s creepy “tongue-first” kissing style with his Soviet gymnast girlfriend. Shudder…The greatest thing about this movie is the footage of the actual Concorde supersonic plane in flight, which was a pretty spectacular piece of engineering, sadly no longer flying. Which is a shame, considering how amazing the plane apparently was at dodging jet fighters, missiles and performing barrel-roll evasive maneuvers. This time Kennedy takes the controls, because no Frenchman’s gonna out-fly an American! Petroni is all man, bedding hookers in Paris and making with such bon mots as, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing.”

If you haven’t seen an Airport movie in a while, and if you love the Seventies, they are pretty fascinating to behold and truly capture the flamboyance of the era. All four films are available in a reasonably priced Terminal pack for added convenience.

And if you ask me, pilots are still some of the coolest guys out there. Whenever I travel, I'm always reassured seeing the seasoned flightcrew up at the controls...so long as its not Karen Black!