AIRPORT 1975: Dir. Jack Smight
Approaching middle age and still looking for another hit film Charlton Heston accepted an offer to star in Universal Pictures's rather unimaginatively entitled sequel Airport 1975. As was his practice, Heston intensely researched the role of an airline pilot who has to instruct his airline stewardess girlfriend (Karen Black) on how to land a 747 airplane by herself when most of the cabin crew have been killed after colliding with a small aircraft. In order to bolster the technical credibility of this seemingly preposterous plot, Heston, utilizing the only jumbo jet simulator in America, tested the veracity of the story-line by simulating the exact circumstances of the film, successfully talking down a real-life air hostess to a safe landing. Apart from Black who has the meatiest of the main roles, Heston gets little support from a largely boring cast of TV faces (Roy Thinnes, Sid Caesar, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), a trendy pop singer (Helen Reddy), and faded film stars of the golden era (Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson, Dana Andrews). Shining like a beacon of good will, only George Kennedy, reprising his memorably gregarious Airport character Joe Patroni, brings any genuine vitality to the drab dialogue. Lazily directed by Jack Smight (Harper), Airport 1975 looks and feels like a typical TV movie of the week from that era, no doubt due to the influence of its producer Jennings Lang, a man credited with inventing the made-for-tv movie format in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, the crew consisted largely of veterans from episodic television including cinematographer Philip Lathrop (Peter Gunn), composer John Cacavas (Kojak), writer Don Ingalls (Have Gun-Will Travel), producer William Frye (Thriller) and even Smight himself (McCloud). Yet I can't help but acknowledge that Airport 1975 still works as trashy, vicarious cinematic junkfood. Even after being mercilessly spoofed by the film Airplane (1980), the situation of a passenger aircraft in jeopardy is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and the entire production would have to be a complete unprofessional mess in order to suppress the concept's sheer entertainment value. Audiences lapped it up, becoming one of the year's top money earners and establishing Heston's reputation as a disaster film talisman. However, the big one was just around corner.
BLU-RAY & DVD
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