{"id":2073,"date":"2024-08-05T19:44:21","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T19:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=2073"},"modified":"2024-10-14T13:25:59","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T17:25:59","slug":"the-concorde-airport-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/05\/the-concorde-airport-79\/","title":{"rendered":"The Concorde… Airport \u201979"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Concorde… Airport \u201979 <\/strong>(1979)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Universal\/(officially) Drama-Thriller\/(unofficially) Comedy\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 113 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence, suggestive material, mature themes)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Lowell Rich\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Eric Roth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Lalo Schifrin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 3, 1979 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $13M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0This 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 \u201979<\/strong> 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\u2019s tagline to read, \u201cFasten your seatbelts, the thrills are terrific… and so are the laughs!\u201d It didn\u2019t work; it was still one of the year\u2019s biggest bombs. It\u2019s also one of the greatest Bad Movie Classics ever made.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u2019t have that, can he? He has one of his guys reprogram the missile they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Who\u2019s 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\u2019s been promoted to pilot. He\u2019s flying alongside French pilot Captain Metrand (Delon, Le Samourai) who\u2019s 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\u2019s network (Davidson, That\u2019s Incredible), the gymnast (Marcovicci, The Hand) he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The biggest challenge is where to start. There is so much wrong with The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong> 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\u2019t 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\u2019s odd how NONE of the stars appear in these scenes. This movie\u2019s 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

While The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong> 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\u2019t 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\u2019s another question. After the events of the first half of their trip, why in God\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Don\u2019t even get me started on the acting. It\u2019s all bad! HOWEVER, mostly everybody seems to be having a grand old time. Even Kennedy doesn\u2019t appear to take it too seriously anymore. He gets the movie\u2019s top line when he says to Isabelle in response to her comment about pilots\u2019 masculinity, \u201cThey don\u2019t call it the cockpit for nothing, honey.\u201d That kind of remark would get Petroni in deep, DEEP doo-doo today. It must have been fun to fly back in \u201979 with the relaxed rules that allow Walker\u2019s character to get high in the lavatory without air marshals breaking down the door. In any event, the cast list for The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong> is interesting to say the least.<\/p>\n

\u00a0At this point, we must decide who to thank or blame for the hilariously misguided mess that is The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong>. The director is David Lowell Rich who previously gave us the TV movie Satan\u2019s 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\u2019t forget those responsible for the cinematography, editing, special effects, makeup and hair. That last one deserves special mention for Davidson\u2019s hair that never moves. I\u2019ll bet if you looked under it, you\u2019d find a Lego stud. In any event, there\u2019s not only enough blame to go around, there\u2019s still some left over.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Not only did The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong> cause the Airport series to crash and burn (plans for Airport \u201982: 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\u2019s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Core, 2012, Geostorm and a bunch of others I can\u2019t think of offhand. Some are better than others but not one of them provides the sheer Bad Movie joy of The Concorde… Airport \u201979<\/strong>. It\u2019s just screwy!\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Concorde… Airport \u201979 (1979)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Universal\/(officially) Drama-Thriller\/(unofficially) Comedy\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 113 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence, suggestive material, mature themes)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Lowell Rich\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Eric Roth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Lalo Schifrin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 3, 1979 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Alain Delon, Susan Blakely, Robert Wagner, Sylvia Kristel, George Kennedy, Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, Charo, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guilty-pleasures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/The-Concorde.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2073"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2837,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2073\/revisions\/2837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}