The Concorde… Airport ’79 (1979) Universal/(officially) Drama-Thriller/(unofficially) Comedy RT: 113 minutes Rated PG (language, violence, suggestive material, mature themes) Director: David Lowell Rich Screenplay: Eric Roth Music: Lalo Schifrin Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop Release date: August 3, 1979 (US) Cast: Alain Delon, Susan Blakely, Robert Wagner, Sylvia Kristel, George Kennedy, Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, Charo, John Davidson, Andrea Marcovicci, Martha Raye, Cicely Tyson, Jimmy Walker, David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge, Avery Schreiber, Sybil Danning, Monica Lewis, Nicolas Coster, Robin Gammell, Ed Begley Jr., Jon Cedar, Sheila DeWindt, Pierre Jalbert, Kathleen Maguire, Macon McCalman, Stacy Heather Tolkin. Box Office: $13M (US)
Rating: ***
This is the one that ended the Airport series, a disaster-in-every-sense movie that could easily pass for a spoof of the entire genre. The Concorde… Airport ’79 has as many unintentional laughs as the parody Airplane has intentional. In an unprecedented marketing strategy, Universal decided to use negative audience reaction- i.e. derisive laughter- to its advantage and changed the poster’s tagline to read, “Fasten your seatbelts, the thrills are terrific… and so are the laughs!” It didn’t work; it was still one of the year’s biggest bombs. It’s also one of the greatest Bad Movie Classics ever made.
The doomed flight is, big surprise, a Concorde supersonic jet flying from Washington D.C. to Moscow with a stopover in Paris. It flies at roughly 2000 MPH. It will take only three hours to get to Paris, more than enough time for a deranged illegal arms dealer, Kevin Harrison (Wagner, Hart to Hart), to try and shoot it down with a missile. Why does he want to do this? Glad you asked. His girlfriend, reporter Maggie Whelan (Blakely, The Towering Inferno), has learned of his illegal dealings and plans to expose him on TV. He can’t have that, can he? He has one of his guys reprogram the missile they’re testing that day so it will hit and destroy the Concorde along with all the evidence against him. Oh yeah, and everybody on board too.
Who’s on board this time? LOL! Another good question. The passenger list reads like an episode of The Love Boat with such acting luminaries as John Davidson, Jimmie Walker, Avery Schreiber (sporting a bad Russian accent) and Charo (cuchi-cuchi!). The only one missing is Ethel Merman. ANYWAY, George Kennedy returns again as Joe Petroni who’s been promoted to pilot. He’s flying alongside French pilot Captain Metrand (Delon, Le Samourai) who’s involved with stewardess Isabelle (Kristel, Emmanuelle). Also on board are the airline president (Albert, Green Acres) and his young hot new wife (Danning, The Three Musketeers), the sports reporter from Maggie’s network (Davidson, That’s Incredible), the gymnast (Marcovicci, The Hand) he’s secretly involved with, her ball-busting coach (McCambridge, Giant), a woman (Tyson, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) carrying a box that contains a human heart for transplant, an aging jazz singer (voice of Chiquita Banana Lewis), her saxophonist (Walker, Good Times), a Russian gymnastics coach (Schreiber, the Doritos guy), his hearing-impaired daughter (Tolkin), the flight engineer (Warner, Time After Time) and an old woman with a weak bladder (Raye, The Bugaloos). Maybe she should have done commercials for Depends instead of Polident. I almost forgot, Charo contributes a cuchi-less cameo as a passenger who gets kicked off the plane after trying to smuggle her little dog on board.
The biggest challenge is where to start. There is so much wrong with The Concorde… Airport ’79 that you could write a book on the subject. Take the special effects. They look like what Edward D. Wood Jr. (Plan 9 from Outer Space) would come up with if given a budget. I haven’t seen anything that fake outside a breast augmentation clinic. The scenes where the plane barrel-rolls to avoid the missile are clearly filmed on a spinning cabin set. It’s odd how NONE of the stars appear in these scenes. This movie’s science goes beyond faulty. Wonky is the better word. In what world is it possible for the pilot to open his side window and fire a flare gun to deflect the heat-seeking missile? At 2000 MPH. And upside down, no less. I’m no expert like Petroni (aka He Who Fires the Flare Gun) but even I can see a few things wrong with this scenario. It defies all logic, a commodity in very short supply here.
While The Concorde… Airport ’79 lacks logic, it has a surplus of plot holes. The idea of Wagner wanting to shoot down a plane filled with innocents to stop one person from spilling his secrets can be explained away by virtue of his character being the villain. Villains come up the nuttiest ideas. Just look at any James Bond villain. ANYWAY, if he wants to kill Maggie so bad, why doesn’t he wait until he has her alone in Paris? She gives him ample opportunity to do so when she goes out on a dinner date with him, an invitation she accepts knowing how dangerous he is. Speaking of Paris, here’s another question. After the events of the first half of their trip, why in God’s name do the passengers get back on the plane? Any right-minded person would cancel or transfer to another flight. Are these people idiots or what?
Don’t even get me started on the acting. It’s all bad! HOWEVER, mostly everybody seems to be having a grand old time. Even Kennedy doesn’t appear to take it too seriously anymore. He gets the movie’s top line when he says to Isabelle in response to her comment about pilots’ masculinity, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing, honey.” That kind of remark would get Petroni in deep, DEEP doo-doo today. It must have been fun to fly back in ’79 with the relaxed rules that allow Walker’s character to get high in the lavatory without air marshals breaking down the door. In any event, the cast list for The Concorde… Airport ’79 is interesting to say the least.
At this point, we must decide who to thank or blame for the hilariously misguided mess that is The Concorde… Airport ’79. The director is David Lowell Rich who previously gave us the TV movie Satan’s School for Girls and would go on to give us the Carol Burnett-Alan Arkin buddy comedy Chu Chu and the Philly Flash. The screenplay is the work of Eric Roth who would go on to win an Oscar for writing Forrest Gump before penning another Bad Movie Classic, the 1997 Kevin Costner debacle The Postman. Oh, we mustn’t forget those responsible for the cinematography, editing, special effects, makeup and hair. That last one deserves special mention for Davidson’s hair that never moves. I’ll bet if you looked under it, you’d find a Lego stud. In any event, there’s not only enough blame to go around, there’s still some left over.
Not only did The Concorde… Airport ’79 cause the Airport series to crash and burn (plans for Airport ’82: UFO were scrapped), it also marked the beginning of the end for the disaster movie genre. It was followed by the cinematic catastrophes Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Meteor and When Time Ran Out. Then came Airplane! Over the years, there have been attempts to revive the genre- e.g. Independence Day, Daylight, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Core, 2012, Geostorm and a bunch of others I can’t think of offhand. Some are better than others but not one of them provides the sheer Bad Movie joy of The Concorde… Airport ’79. It’s just screwy!
