Airport Terminal Pack [DVD]

If you can find this at a decent price - I got my set for just over £5 - snap it up for nostalgia value and sheer entertainment.

The series starts off very stylishly with the soapy, melodramatic Airport (1970), and declines in quality over time. My favourite things about the original are Alfred Newman's classy score, the schmaltzy gimmicks (such as the overused split screen) and the excellent cast.

Airport '75 is surprisingly well made, with spectacular photography and generally high production values. At the same time it is terribly cheesy and replete with bad dialogue, making this the prime target for the later Airplane! spoof. But it's fun and occasionally suspenseful. I enjoyed cameos from the likes of Hollywood old-timers Myrna Loy and Gloria Swanson.

Airport '77 was always my favourite as a kid. The production values are poorer here (the jumbo jet bobbing its head out of the Atlantic waters looks like a cardboard cut-out), and there are patches of dullness, but again it's generally entertaining.

The Concorde: Airport '79 is BY FAR the worst in the series, and it is no surprise it was laughed out of the theatres in previews. The script is painfully bad, and the plot is outright ridiculous. The height of silliness is when pilot George Kennedy diverts a missile by opening the cockpit window of a concorde and firing a flare gun *while flying upside down.* You can't make this stuff up. Well, evidently someone did, and probably even got paid for it. I felt I should have been paid to *watch* it.

Nevertheless, their God-awfulness is a major reason for watching these movies. I enjoyed the set, and if you grew up with the series, you undoubtedly will too.

They have been on the TV a million times but they seem to have disappeared recently and I was beginning to miss them...who'd have thought! LOL

The first film in the series is just such a wonderful piece of cinema that its worth getting the whole pack just to get that one film.

The second film I particularly love, its just full of great actors and full of suspense, love it.

The third faintly reeks of cheese, but in a wonderful 70's disaster movie way that just turns this into a gem of a film.

The fourth is plainly ridiculous but I just love George Kennedy who by this time can do no wrong and Robert Wagner very much in his Jonathan Hart type role, albeit an evil Jonathan Hart :-) also Charo is a delight to behold! LOL

Just get them, you know you don't need to be convinced, you love 'em! LOL

Although The Poseidon Adventure gets all the credit, Airport is the film that really kicked off the 70s disaster craze. Unlike its three follow-ups, this adaptation of Arthur Hailey's doorstop novel really is as much about the snowbound airport as it is the imperilled plane, one of many plots the movie juggles. Hailey had built his novel around a 1956 Canadian TV movie he wrote called Flight Into Danger, but much of it plays like a Peyton Place-esquire soap opera: will embattled airport manager Burt Lancaster stay married to Dana Wynter or to his job - or will he go off into the sunrise with that nice airline rep Jean Seberg? Will pilot Dean Martin leave his wife now he's got stewardess Jacqueline Bisset up the duff? Will Helen Hayes' scene-stealing geriatric stowaway get caught? Will George Kennedy clear the blocked runway in time to avoid tragedy? Will Van Heflin's mentally troubled demolitions expert set off the bomb in his briefcase? Would there be a movie if he didn't?

Shot like an epic to emphasise the size and scale of everything (it even opens with an overture of sound effects of a busy airport terminal before bursting into Alfred Newman's urgent rumba-led score) it's a big, glossy well crafted entertainment that still holds up surprisingly well, especially in widescreen where the occasional split-screen effects come into their own (not to mention a great gag with a priest and an annoying passenger during the crash landing that's usually lost in the TV panning-and-scanning). It's the least sensational of the series but still the most effective, and there's no shortage of familiar faces in the passenger seats, from Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Jesse Royce Landis, Whit Bissell and the original "Jimmy Bond 007" of the CIA, Barry Nelson. Sadly, setting something of an unfortunate pattern for the series, the 707 used in the film crashed in 1989, somewhat disproving the constant accolades the plane's abilities receive throughout the film ("The only thing a 707 can't do is read!").

It wasn't until the 70s disaster movie craze was well under way that Universal got round to a sequel to its 1970 blockbuster Airport - largely because the lucrative profits deals Lancaster and Martin secured on the first film made reassembling the original cast impractical (though George Kennedy did return to provide a vague fig leaf of continuity). It wasn't until producer Jennings Lang came across a script intended as a TV movie that some bright spark thought of slapping the Airport brand on it, adding 1975 to the title and abandoning the actual Airport aspect to concentrate on the planes in jeopardy instead.

The result, Airport 1975 (actually released in 1974) is the other movie that Airplane! lampooned mercilessly, what with sick transplant patients, Hare Krishnas and singing nuns among the passengers, not to mention Charlton Heston in safari suit and shades providing the blueprint for Robert Stack's Rex Kramer and Gloria Swanson in the kind of comeback role that could have been written by Joe Gillis for Norma Desmond (although it was supposedly intended for Garbo). In fact, Swanson wrote her own anecdote-filled dialogue, and boy does it show - this isn't a part, it's a chat show appearance.

Swanson isn't the only star of yesteryear bulking up the cast, with Myrna Loy knocking back several boilermakers, Sid Caesar providing the odd wisecrack while Dana Andrews, every drink he ever took etched onto his face, gets his own back for Effrem Zimbalist crashing into his plane in The Crowded Sky by crashing into Zimbalist's 747 this time round, leaving stewardess Karen Black to fly the plane until Chucky baby comes to the rescue, taking off his shades for a midair transfer that's a mixture of daring stuntwork and pitiful backprojection. Yet it's surprisingly entertaining, superbly photographed by veteran Philip Lathrop, much better directed by Jack Smight than it has any right to be and, as the shortest entry in the series at 107 minutes, keeps things tight enough not to leave too much room to dwell on the absurdities. Well, almost: if ever there was a moment where Linda Blair projectile vomiting on a member of the cloth was not just absolutely justifiable but positively mandatory it's when Helen Reddy sings about her best friend being herself, but sadly Linda doesn't deliver the pea soup on this occasion. But while we may scoff today, Jennings Lang knew what he was doing - no singing nun movie has ever lost money at the box-office, and the film was a big enough hit to guarantee two more sequels with considerably bigger budgets, though not before, in one of those nasty ironies the series is prone to, Dana Andrews' light aircraft in the film really was destroyed in a mid-air collision in 1975. Oh, and if the midair footage looks familiar, that's because Universal recycled it for years, most memorably in the 747 episode of The Incredible Hulk TV series.

Airport '77 has the best pitch of the series, though it never quite makes enough of it: this time a private plane filled with art treasures and millionaire passengers (it's so high-tech it even has an optical video disc player!) en route to the opening of James Stewart's new museum are hijacked by art thieves. Just to add to their woes, while flying low to avoid radar they crash into an oil rig and end up submerged on an unstable ocean ledge in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle while the 747 does a very bad impersonation of a submarine. Since the Navy can't lower the ocean, the only thing to do is to raise the Titanic - sorry, raise the Jumbo Jet...

Unfortunately it never quite makes enough of it, with so much time setting up the plot and the characters that the movie's half over before the plane hits the water and there's less time for plot twists or surprises than you'd like. It doesn't help that, hijackers aside, the passengers are a generally likable bunch of old Hollywood and beloved TV stars - Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon), Dracula (Christopher Lee), Kolchak (Darren McGavin), Hooky from Zulu (James Booth), Rick Deckard's boss (M. Emmett Walsh), Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard), Scarlet O'Hara's rival (Olivia De Havilland) and the guy who fingered Harry Lime (Joseph Cotton) among them - with only Christopher Lee's saintly marine biologist and his drunk wife Lee Grant offering much in the way of dramatic conflict. Still, despite a few plot holes (you'd think someone from the oil rig they crashed into would report it) it passes the time professionally enough and it's hard to dislike. None of the deleted footage from the extended TV version is included on the disc, nor is the 10-minute making of featurette, with the theatrical trailer the only extra.

"Oh, you pilots are such men." "They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey." Dialogue like that is just one of many reasons why The Concorde... Airport '79 (or, if you saw it in the UK where it dragged its heels getting released there, Airport '80: The Concorde) was the last and by far the least of the series. The disaster movie was in dire straits in the late 70s, what with The Swarm having offered much unintentional hilarity and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out and City on Fire simply offering much boredom, and the desperation to find a new spin on the genre is all too apparent here. This time it's a conspiracy plot, with Susan Blakely's news anchorwoman discovering billionaire boyfriend Robert Wagner has been selling arms to terrorists and the North Vietnamese. Naturally, she decides to tell him everything rather than make the story public, but, he fobs her off by explaining "I'm a very rich man. I have everything in life I could ever want. Why would I jeopardise that by doing something so incredibly stupid?" Just in case she doesn't buy that line, rather than, say hire a hit-man to kill her on the ground, he decides to do things the smart way by planning to destroy the Concorde while she's flying to Moscow via Paris. "I've done a lot of things I've been ashamed of, but I am not a murderer," he insists indignantly on his way to reprogramme a guided missile to destroy the plane. So, nothing incredibly stupid there. And when that fails, he sends a jet fighter after it. And when that fails...

Don't even think of looking for anything resembling logic here: this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that even the studio gave up on and marketed as a comedy in the US after critics laughed it off the screen. Where the previous three entries all had the look of glossy big-budget entertainments, this small-screen friendly effort (the only one not to be shot in 2.35:1 widescreen) doesn't even manage to make the Concorde look good, which is quite a feat. TV veteran David Lowell Rich presumably got the directing gig because he was fast, cheap and had previously directed TV movie SST: Disaster in the Sky where Peter Graves' supersonic airplane found itself unable to land due to sabotage and Senegalese flu (which was not, intentionally at least, a comedy despite the presence of a young Billy Crystal in the cast) and seemed like the natural choice for what looks like a $14m TV movie that somehow escaped into theatres when no-one was looking.

Cast like a bad episode of Hollywood Squares, stars are in very short supply this time round, and most of the few vaguely familiar faces seem to have been rounded up from rehab clinics and busted sitcoms. Alain Delon gives the Hollywood career that one last shot as the pilot, "Happy Fish" (don't ask) George Kennedy moves from the executive suite to the co-pilot's seat in the hope of reminding people of the other movies, while the rest of the ensemble includes a couple of veterans of The Towering Inferno (Wagner and Blakely), a soft-porn star (Sylvia Kristel, trying to go respectable), an Ingmar Bergman regular (Bibi Andersson - and she's the one playing the hooker! Read more ›