Airport 1975 (1974) – Review

Even before the team of Zucker Abrahams Zucker took down the entirety of a genre with a single movie with Airplane!, there was always something deeply absurd about the disaster movies of the 70s. The various conventions and rules that came with a flipping ship, a burning skyscraper or a beleaguered airport usually merged with the overly serious performances from jobbing, legendary actors to create such overblown melodrama, it never failed to put a smile on my face.
The unsubtle foreshadowing to the disaster, the introduction to all the partially doomed players, the thrill of the chaos when the shit well and truly hits the fan and the morbid fun of seeing which of the cast ends up biting the bullet in ways so tragic it can’t help but dredge up accidental giggles, it all comes together to make a perfectly imperfect whole – and that’s just the good ones. However, once the genre fully took off after the opening salvo of Airport back in 1970, a sequel meant that we saw one of the only disaster movies to even get itself a legitimate franchise.
Prepare for take off, it’s Airport 1975 – and it’s fucking hilarious.

It’s never overly pleasant to fly the red eye, but the passengers of Columbia Airlines Flight 409 are about to have an extra shitty time of it when their flight from Washington to LA is diverted to Salt Lake City in Utah due to some iffy weather. The passenger list is an absolute peach too as it contains a bunch of drunk businessmen, a couple of nuns, a sprinkling of oversharing nervous flyers, a young girl being transported to her kidney transplant and Gloria Swanson recording her life story for her memoir – so obviously something bad is going to happen.
As if on cue, a businessman flying his private plane also diverted to Salt Lake City suddenly has an immaculately timed heart attack and manages to collide with the cockpit of Flight 409 blinding the captain, killing the flight engineer and sucking the co-pilot out of the sizable hole made by the impact but the captain manages to switch on the autopilot before chaos reigns. This leaves only plucky Head Stewardess Nancy Pryor to try and figure things out as the plane heads towards the formidable mountains of the Wasatch Range and as she radios for help, only her leathery on-again-off-boyfriend, Al Murdock, can possibly help talk her down. Of course, it helps enormously that Murdock is Columbia’s chief flight instructor (handy that), but talking her through making the occasional turn to avoid the worst of the mountains just isn’t going to be enough when it’s determined that Nancy isn’t going to be able handle landing the plane with half the console trashed.
As the passengers panic and that little girl who needs that transplant slumps into her chair more and more, an audacious plan is put into action with Columbia’s Vice President of Operations, Joe Patroni (whose wife and son are on board) and Al trying to lower a new pilot into the plane from a helicopter. It’s a crazy plan, but it’s the only hope these people have, dammit!

Of course, with such pimped up stakes at play and such actors as Charlton Heston and a returning George Kennedy doing the best stoic jaw clenching a 70s budget could buy, Airport 1975 – actually released in 1974 – was going to have a tough time trying to ensure that its audience could keep a straight face; however, when you realise that this is one of the two films that directly influenced Airplane! (the other being 1957s Zero Hour!), the poor film has no chance to avoid maximum mockage. However, my counter argument is that Airport 1975 is far more valuable as an unintentional comedy that it ever was as an overwrought thriller that sees Karen Black try to fly a crippled plane. For a start, to take any of the casting seriously these days is an exercise in futility, especially when you realise that Heston also starred in the similarly ridiculous Earthquake in the same year. Joining him is Kennedy, the only returning cast member from the original movie as the two-fisted, fiery Joe Patroni who somehow has since gone from being the chief mechanic for Trans World Airlines in Chicago to Columbia’s Vice President of Operations despite tackling the same jobs in exactly the same way – oh don’t worry, he’s a fucking pilot in one of the next ones.
However, as we cast our eye over the passengers, things get so random you’d swear there’s an oxygen leak in the cabin – for a start, Linda Blair, the little girl from the fucking Exorcist is on board as the sick little girl so ruthlessly ribbed in Airplane!, right down to the guitar playing nun. While you recover from that, Jerry Stiller comes on board, pissed to the gills and acting suspiciously like Frank Costanza from Seinfeld, but matters get even weirder when the running joke is that he’s so drunk, he actually sleeps through the entire disaster while his friends panic. Elsewhere, CHiPS’ Eric Estrada is on hand as one of the flight crew with a mode of flirting that make HR sweat, comedian Sid Caesar is laden with a woefully unfunny role as a chatty passenger and possibly most surreal of all, is the presence of Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson who, for some reason known only to God and the screenwriter, is actually playing herself in an air disaster movie as she relates her life story to her assistant. The fact that this actually was her last film appearance retroactively makes the whole idea even more bizarre – but you know what, it’s goddamn weird and I’m here for it.

Finally, props have to be given to Karen Black, who essentially is the lead character, but still has to endure being yelled at by Heston over the radio because she’s scared and numerous unflattering close ups of her screaming, but you’d have to admit that if the film was made today, she’d be the one to land it and they wouldn’t have to literally fly in her constantly mansplaining boyfriend to bail her out. Sorry Karen – in the 70s, it was easier to believe that you could transfer a fifty one year old man between aircraft at 20,000 feet than have a woman land a plane…
The disaster itself is certainly novel as a mid-collision sounds like it would be quite tough to pull off in 1975 – and you’d be right – but the sight of a plane blue screened directly outside the window of the 747 and the subsequent shot of an obvious dummy getting sucked out into oblivion is far more entertaining than realism any day. However, a massive nod of genuine respect has to go to the fact that the majority of the shots of the aircraft cruising worryingly low through the mountains of the Wasatch Range are actually done with a real plane and the fact the only attempts at realism at done with scenes outside the plane is greatly fitting. Of course, the money shot is the moment when a guy is lowered by a cable from a military helicopter to try and squeeze into the cockpit of the stricken plane is a chef’s kiss moment that treads that nigh-invisible line between legitimately gripping and utterly fucking stupid.

While certainly inferior to the original film (which actually set the majority of its action in an airport – hence the title), Airport 1975 certainly makes up for it by being so silly (the Airplane! connection certainly helps), you can’t help but be enraptured by the disaster movie at its most ridiculous.
Lunacy is my co-pilot.
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