El Concorde... Aeropuerto '79

All the entries in the 70's disaster movie franchise "Airport" – a total of four movies spread over one decade – have been chastised by critics as well as regular action movie fanatics for being too grotesque and ludicrous. Me, personally, I liked the three previous installments a lot, but I can't but admit that the swan song in the series is a completely laughable effort. The supposedly adrenalin-rushing script is absurd, the stereotypical characters are cartoonish, the acting performances are wooden and the action sequences are downright hilarious. The set-up and plot of "The Concorde" is faithful to the previous movies. We have a cast full of acclaimed names, often in inferior little roles, and a screenplay that brings together pretty much everything that can go wrong on an intercontinental flight. The prestigious Concorde aircraft is ready to fly from New York to Paris and then onwards towards Moscow in celebration of the 1980 Olympics. One of the passengers is the female journalist Maggie Whelan, who's in possession of some important evidence that will unmask her ex-fiancée Kevin Harrison as an illegal weapon dealer. It's most vital for him that Maggie never reaches Moscow and thus he tries to kill her, as well as the rest of the Concorde passengers and crew, subsequently through nuclear missiles and sabotage. Luckily for the passengers, the Concorde has two of the world's biggest macho men behind the steering wheel with the French Captain Paul Metrand and the American veteran pilot Joe Patroni. "The Concorde: Airport 79" is a dumb and fairly pathetic film, but fortunately enough it remains amusing and never bores for one second. The sight of an hi-tech advanced airplane making loops in order to evade missiles is definitely bad in an entertaining way and the hammy performances of A-list stars are fun to observe as well. Particularly Robert Wagner is tremendous as the villain. With his straight face and eloquent monologues, he represents the prototype of Bond-movie villains and I strongly suspect that Mike Myers hired him to play Number Two in the Austin Powers' movie solely based on his performance here. Alain Delon looks quite bored and soft-erotica star Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Kristel is rather unnoticeable when she keeps her clothes on. Fun bloke George Kennedy is the only actor who appeared in all four of the "Airport" movies, so it's truly a shame that he plays his biggest role in the worst of the series. The dialogs are lame and some of the clichéd sub plots are horrendous (does there really have to be an emergency donor organ transport in every disaster movie?), but I certainly didn't regret the two hours of my life that I wasted on watching this film.

This old-fashioned , disconcerting catastrophe picture contains thriller , suspense , drama , moderate tension and being entertaining but with lots of flaws and gaps . All clichéd , incredibly far-fetched non-sense , the result is a very superior hokum . The movie is another jetliner epic with heroes as Alain Delon and George Kennedy playing two valiant pilots . Plenty of stock roles with regurgitation of all usual stereotypical situations from disaster films , including a fairly moronic screenplay . This is the four of four movies in the "Airport" series adapted from the Arthur Hailey novel . It's embarrassing and amusing as well as full clichés and stereotypes , including the unavoidable accident , with below average acting by all-star-cast . As the Concorde takes off several threads of the plot are already in motion . American based Federation World Airlines has just acquired a Concorde jet , which will make its inaugural commercial flight from Washington D.C to Paris and subsequently Moscow , in the former Soviet Unión . It is captained by Alain Delon who muses : ¨It's still amazing to me , only three and half hours ago we were in Paris ¨ . And another captain , co-pilot Patroni yells ¨I'd love to see what my horoscope said for the morning¨ . The film is detailing hectic flighty piloted by Alain Delon/George Kennedy and the relationship among passengers . As the Concorde is chased by missiles when the nasty Robert Wagner , who runs an arms plant , has been caught selling weapons to the bad guys of the world , and his journalist-mistress -Susan Blakely- is the woman with the evidence . Then , villain Robert launches an attack missile against the Concorde . As the captain pilot Delon banks to avoid two of Wagner's fighter aircrafts . At the end takes places a crashing in the Alps . If you've seen the original ¨Airport¨ by George Seaton based on the Arthur Hailey's novel 'the daddy of them all' , you have seen them all .

It is an insincere , slick attempt to find box-office magic again , but this time didn't achieved hit smash . As the film was a critical and commercial failure at the box-office with the lowest financial take of the four "Airport" movies . Unflagging pace , plastic acting , hilarious dialogue and stock characters recounting a hectic flight in Concorde . Filmed at the height of the disaster genre from the 7os , this entry in the spectacular series is wasted by lousy acting embarrassing special effects and non-sense plot . The screenplay develops into ¨Coyote and The Road Runner¨ stuff and one can visualize Robert Wagner jumping up and down with rage as each new attempt fail .When American audiences greeted the film with derisive laughter, Universal decided to market it as a comedy, with the Tagline : "Fasten your seat belts, the thrills are terrific and so are the laughs!" . The movie was made and released around the time of another Concorde film, Concorde Affaire '79 (1979) , the two films both had French cast and French story elements , even their titles were similar . Look quickly to Eddie Albert , Bibi Andersson , Charo , Andrea Marcovicci , Cicely Tyson , David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge , Jimmie Walker , Sybil Danning , Jon Cedar , Ed Begley Jr , final feature film of actress Martha Raye, among others . In addition , George Kennedy and Monica Lewis are the only returning actors from the "Airport" movie series to appear in the movie ; Kennedy's continuing character of Joe Patroni appeared in all four "Airport" pictures . The motion picture was ridiculously directed by David Lowell Rich , habitual TV director and occasionally for movie theater . It's an inoffensive diversion but is sometimes tediously unspooled . The flick won't appeal to disaster genre enthusiasts .

This sagas belongs the following films : the first was ¨Airport¨ (1970) , unanimously deemed the best , it paved the way for many lesser flicks including its many sequels , being directed by George Seaton with Burt Lancaster , Jean Seberg , Dean Martin , Van Heflin ; ¨Airport 75¨ (1974) by Jack Smight with Charlton Heston , Karen Black and Gloria Swanson , ¨Airport 77¨ (1977) considered one of the best of the series , being directed by Jerry Jameson with Jack Lemmon , Christopher Lee , James Stewart , Lee Grant , Robert Hooks , Monte Markham , Kathleen Quinlan , Darren McGavin ,Gil Gerard , M. Emmet Walsh , Pamela Bellwood , Michael Pataki , James Booth , leading to the last of the tired ones , this ¨Airport 79¨ (1979) by David Lowell Rich with . This picture was nominated for Worst Picture at the Hastings Bad Cinema Society's 2nd Stinkers Bad Movie Awards in 1979 and listed among The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made in "The Official Razzie Movie Guide" . Furthermore , ¨ Skyjacked (1972) ¨ by John Guillermin with Charlton Heston , James Brolin and this film was parodied heavily in Airplane! (1980) by Jim Abrahams and David Zucker

In the beginning, there was "Airport", an A-list, ultra-slick adaptation of a best-selling book, nominated for multiple Oscars (including Best Picture!) Then came "Airport 1975" with too much humor (intentional and unintentional) and Karen Black flying a damaged 747. "Airport '77" had a private plane sinking beneath the ocean while rich passengers dropped like flies. In an inane attempt to continue the exploitation of the original film (and cash in on the notoriety of the then-new Concorde, the fastest commercial plane ever), this film came along and ended the series for good. A year later, "Airplane!" would slam the coffin lid and seal it with it's hysterical sending up of the many clichés of the air-disaster genre. Here, Wagner is a high-powered industrialist who's been selling arms to enemies of the U.S. When his reporter mistress Blakely is informed of this, he tries kill her. After she boards the Concorde en route to Moscow, he (ludicrously) decides to pull out every stop in the book to demolish the aircraft, even though it is full of Olympians, TV journalists, music legends, human organs and little old ladies who can't stay out of the bathroom! The entire film is both stagnant and simultaneously uproarious at the same time. The director, writer, editor and the actors can't seem to get ANYTHING right! (See Blakely's ridiculously unconvincing newscast in which she never once looks into the camera and in which clips from events AS THEY ARE HAPPENING IN REAL TIME parade across the screen.) It also contains some of the most abominable blue-screen and model special effects ever to be seen in a major studio film. The cast of the film is huge and full of names, though most of them are given, literally, nothing to do but embarrass themselves. Wagner looks very tired and hardly bothers to vary his facial expressions. Blakely works hard but is defeated by the stupidity of the character and the script. Kennedy (the one actor who was in all four films) is promoted to Captain this time, but is reduced to cracking crude sexual jokes and (in the film's most celebratedly lunatic scene) cracking open the cockpit window and shooting off a flare! Haggard, former screen-god Delon as another pilot tries to beat preposterous dialogue like, "Your hair is my french fries" in his affair with sex kitten stewardess Kristel (whose calf-length uniform has a split up to her thigh!) Other oddities include McCambridge spouting a dreadful Russian accent and flouncing around in curtain-like tops as a gymnastics coach, Walker as a pot-smoking sax player, Lewis as a jazz legend (!) who feels she may be losing it, Schreiber as a Russian coach with a deaf daughter (at least she can't hear Lewis singing!) and Raye as a grandma with a bladder control problem (first dentures and now this?! What? Did June Allyson turn the part down?) Special mention must be given to the side-splitting appearance of Tyson as a mother escorting (!) a frozen heart to her dying son. (Since when do parents go off and collect organs while their kid is expiring somewhere else??) In an apparent attempt to disappear from this rancid film, she hides her face under every imaginable object. Already buried under Victoria Principal's fright wig from "Earthquake", she uses hankies, a clutch purse, blankets, ANYTHING to obscure her face from being seen, eventually turning away from the camera entirely! The endless cast list also contains Albert as the airline owner and Danning as his trophy wife, Davidson as a reporter, Charo as a pushy passenger attempting to stowaway a Chihuahua and Marcovicci who gets another special mention. Unbelievably, she plays a 24 year-old gymnast (!) going for her third gold medal, which is crazy enough except that she was 31 in real life! Just one more nutty aspect of this thoroughly retarded film. Perhaps the most bizarre of all is the fact that the plane goes through several traumas, spinning violently and nearly crashing, yet after a layover in Paris, virtually every single passenger GETS BACK ON! As if things weren't bad enough, the Olympics that were pushed so heavily in this movie wound up being boycotted that year by the U.S., so the whole film was outdated before it was even released anyway! Good for a few laughs, but worthless as drama.

Some slack might be cut this movie due to the fact that it was made in 1979. That much said, it really is pretty dire.

Never mind the laughable back-projection or the awful, awful camera-tracking of supposed "in-flight" objects, it's the stunts that the Concorde pulls off that will have you blinking in disbelief at the absurdity. Barrel-rolls, loop-the-loops and violent "evasive" maneuvers left me wondering why the Air-Forces of the world didn't just fly Concordes as their main fighters.

So, here are the important lessons I learned from this celluloid cheese-fest:

1. The Concorde is at least as agile as a Phantom 4 jet-fighter.

2. You can fire a flare gun at Mach 2 simply by opening the cockpit window and sticking your arm out.

3. If the flare gun fails to discharge, do not drop it, as it may then go off.

4. The Concorde can dodge up to two Sidewinder missiles fired at it at once.

5. A flare will distract a heat-seeking missile every time.

6. Switching off your jet-engines is a sure-fire way of throwing heat-seeking missiles off track if 5 (above) fails.

7. When performing a crash-landing in the Concorde, it is apparently impossible to jettison your fuel beforehand.

8. Concorde pilots are all combat-trained veterans.

As you might imagine, this film is not very realistic. The effects are primitive by today's standards and that, coupled with the nonsense acrobatics the Concorde performs, makes this a movie deserving of little but scorn.

Not recommended. Not recommended at all!

I remember walking out of an Australian movie theatre in 1980 and saying to my brother..."That was a disaster movie but what was the disaster?". Granted, I was a child at the time.

This Airport movie is different to the other three, no big sea dive or big collision, Airport '79 just seemed to be all over the place! However, the film has improved with age and two recent viewings have been very much enjoyed. It has a touch of The Towering Inferno (1974) with Robert Wagner still being up to no good, the miniature effects work of the Concorde itself is pleasing to my eyes and the film starts with a very uplifting Lalo Schifrin theme tune.

Perhaps Schifrin was trying to be the new disaster movie composer as in 1980 he would score Irwin Allen's When Time Ran Out as well.

There was to be a 5th Airport movie but the poor box office takings for Airport '79 put an end to all that. Too bad as all four Airport films are a special part of the 1970s and still survive repeat viewings to this day.