(1974)2.5Bruce EderJack Smight's Airport 1975 was four years and a whole Hollywood world away from George Seaton's Airport. Gone were the likes of Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Van Heflin, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, Helen Hayes, et al., and, on the production end, Alfred Newman, Edith Head, Ernest Laszlo, Preston Ames. In their places were a more ragged, and even downright silly, cast (halfway toward the parody of Airplane!), and a threadbare-looking production -- at least by the standards of a feature film. Indeed, Airport 1975 seems like a hybrid, somewhere between a made-for-TV movie and a theatrical feature. It's shot in Panavision, but offers a John Cacavas score that sounds like a dry run for the music he wrote for Kojak. The opening credits also have a cheap, flat look about them, with minimal style to their design or care in their editing or structure, whereas Airport's opening credits were exciting, as well as a study in slick editing. Even the lack of crowds and extras make the sequel look more like something out of a movie-of-the-week.
Once the movie actually gets going, it looks a little better, though the screen is filled with names that would mainly be associated with television in the years to come, including Erik Estrada, Norman Fell, Conrad Janis, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Sid Caesar, Ed Nelson, Beverly Garland, Christopher Norris, and Jerry Stiller, interspersed with such real movie veterans asMyrna Loy (trying to be this film's Helen Hayes) and Gloria Swanson, plus one former star (Dana Andrews) on his last legs. Add to all that one star treading water in his career (Charlton Heston); another collecting his biggest paychecks and on his way to the biggest billing of his career (George Kennedy); one pop singer (Helen Reddy) doing one of the most wretchedly miserable acting turns ever attempted by a vocalist; Linda Blair turning in a performance so frighteningly bad that she makes her role in The Exorcist look benign; and one genuinely talented actress (Karen Black) trapped in the middle of this mess, and you've got the makings for a real train-wreck of a movie.
That's what happened on subsequent entries in the series, but what averts the same outcome here is the presence of a suspenseful plot supported by excellent special effects and aerial photography (which can only be appreciated seeing the film letterboxed) and the fact that the three stars and the lesser-known supporting players (such as Alan Fudge and John Lupton) perform well enough so that the movie leaps over the seemingly impossible chasm of its schlocky casting and production and a script so bad that it even has Sid Caesar's character making light of the drinking problem that blighted his life. Needless to say, this was not a movie that producer Jennings Lang was going to be proud of. Like Jaws 2, Jaws 3, etc. from the same studio, it was made to generate easy money for Universal. Interestingly enough, there is one supremely ironic moment early in the film that should have shown anyone involved just how far removed they were from producing anything of real cinematic value. The in-flight movie is George Lucas' American Graffiti, which showed a level of invention and a loose, free-flowing approach to cinematic storytelling that makes this movie seem all the poorer. Indeed, American Graffiti has rated a serious Special Edition DVD from Universal, whereas no one would ever seriously propose a such a release of Airport 1975.
In the wake of the 45-million-dollar gross of the original Airport (1970), Universal was all but required by an act of Congress to produce Airport '75. Charlton Heston heads the all-star cast as Alan Murdock, the former test pilot who must keep a disabled 747 from crashing in flames. The crisis begins when a businessman (Dana Andrews), flying his small private plane, suffers a fatal heart attack and the plane smashes into the cockpit of the 747. Following Murdock's radioed instructions, stewardess Nancy Pryor (Karen Black) takes over the controls. The special-guest passenger lineup includes Helen Reddy as a singing nun (a character wickedly satirized in the 1980 parody Airplane!), Myrna Loy as an alcoholic, and Sid Caesar as a garrulous passenger. While Airport '75 yielded only 25 million dollars at the box office, the franchise continued, spawning Airport '77 a few years later and Airport '79 two years after that.
