The Concorde… Airport ‘79
OK… I received this beauty as a holiday gift from my girlfriend. I had expressed interest in it, as I am something of a Disaster Flick buff. This movie is 30 years old, and it’s no less awful than any of the other Airport flicks. In fact it’s far, far worse. It’s really, really bad. It’s terrible. It’s painfully, terribly, painfully, awfully, grievously, miserably, badly, horribly, terribly, disgustingly, ridiculously, wildly, marvelously awful.
Wait… what? Marvelously awful?
Yes.
It combines much of the “intrigue” (sabotage, decompression at altitude, plane falling apart in flight, forbidden (or at least ill-advised) romances, and so on) of all three predecessor movies into one “compelling” “story” with unmatched “editing”, “stunning” “special effects”, and an … “involving” score.
The dialog? Absolutely horrid. I’ve seen some bad movies in my day… This has to be the worst dialog, start to finish, of any movie I’ve ever seen. This makes the stilted, wooden exchanges between Charlton Heston and Karen Black in Airport 1975 seem downright passionate.
Casting? Well, William Batliner and Robert J. LaSanka , responsible for casting such blockbusters as “Heartbeeps”, “The Nude Bomb” and “House Calls” really left their mark on this beauty. Jimmie Walker as a philosophical atheist jazz saxophonist?! Charo? Never mind what her character is supposed to be (which I don’t recall it ever being revealed in the film)… Charo? In a supposedly serious disaster flick? Please. David Warner as the Flight Engineer? Uuuuhhhh… Interesting choice… I mean the character is completely flat and meaningless… David Warner would go on to play Jack the Ripper in “Time After Time”, Dillinger/Sark/MCP in “TRON” and Chancellor Gorkon in “Star Trek VI”… Already a fairly established actor in 1978/79… given this worthless role? Martha Rae as the incontinent old woman (that’s all we know about her…. she’s “comic relief”)? Avery Schreiber (a commedian) as Soviet Olympic coach Markov, who appears to have nothing at all to do with being an Olympic (something) coach… he’s only (deeply) involved with his deaf daughter. Makes sense. John Davidson?! Just having him in the movie is kinda stupid, but as a TV journalist having an affair with a 24-year-old Soviet gymnast???!! That’s just flat-out ridiculous. Robert Wagner as a crooked defense contractor?! Lest we forget, the perennial George Kennedy as “Joe Patroni”… not just a mechanic, now… no, he’s an airline pilot. It goes on and on.
The dialog is abominable. Flat, pointless, and vapid. The French stewardess, who’s bonking the French pilot, tells him and Patroni (in bad Frenglish), “You pilots are such… men!”, to which Patroni replies, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing!” When did he become such a douchebag? The French (and other European) accents fade in and out. The shoeleather is laid bare. Scenes which seem to require some emotional gravitas from the dialog have none. Some of the actors are clearly trying to service their dialog as best they can, but to no avail. It’s THAT bad! Even more agonizing is the fake fictionalized “news broadcast” in the first 10 minutes of the movie.
The special effects are neither special, nor effective. TV’s “Battlestar Galactica” (1978.. the Lorne Greene version), which re-used battle sequence elements so much as to be utterly laughable, was far more credible. Compositing is positively inexcusably bad for that era. Practical effects are atrocious… The keypad on the lower cargo door.. see that and refrain from laughing hysterically. I dare you!
The score is … unbearable…? It tries to push emotion into scenes which are barren of it.
The editing is just plain awful. The movie advances like a standard soap opera, with little snippets intended to tease the viewer into watching just a few minutes more to see how things shake out, but with the dialog as hackneyed as it is, this technique leaves the viewer wondering why we couldn’t just stick with a scene long enough to resolve something.
Then, there’s the story arc (or lack of it). There are no heroes. There is no tension among the characters (except… the poorly manufactured tension between Robert Wagner’s character and reporter Maggie Whelan.) There is no agnst. There is no hunger. There is no motivation (other than Robert Wagner’s character’s desire to both kill and bed Maggie Whelan). In the end, the Concorde lands in a snow field, and everyone survives, and RJW’s character apparently commits suicide, never bring tried. The film, if it can so be called, ends with a shot of a Concorde flying over the cloud deck at sunset (or sunrise)…. what?!!
“The Concorde… Airport ‘79″ is unmitigated excrement, and yet, it is almost impossible to not watch.