Airport Terminal Pack [2 Discs]Airport Terminal Pack [2 Discs]

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MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

    Okay, so no "serious" viewer will buy -- or, at least, admit to buying -- this double-disc set containing the four Universal Pictures' Airport movies, from the big-budget, high-profile original, Airport (1970), directed by George Seaton, through the sequels Airport 1975 (directed by Jack Smight) and Airport '77 (the work of Jerry Jameson), to the final entry, Airport '79: Concorde, helmed by David Lowell Rich. Only the first was taken seriously by audiences and, in fact, the second and third movies were among the early manifestations of the creeping "sequel-itis" that would afflict American movies from the '70s onward. (It was but a short jump from Airport 1975 to Jaws 2 [from the very same studio, Universal], etc., and from there to the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series.) That doesn't mean, however, that the four movies here don't all bear at least a look, even if the points-of-interest lie outside the boundaries of their cinematic virtues.

    The first movie, George Seaton's Airport (1970), was one of the last gasps of the old Hollywood, doing what it still did better than any other moviemaking colony, parading major, recognizable stars and a screen icon or two (Burt Lancaster, Helen Hayes) across the screen -- and a super-wide Todd-AO-proportioned screen at that -- in a story that encompassed adventure, suspense, romance, and infidelity (interspersed with some very carefully placed comic relief), around the work of the top veteran craftsmen of the period. Seaton was nearly at the end of his career, and composer Alfred Newman never lived to see his Oscar nomination for the score here; it was all superficial, if not outright silly, but also downright spellbinding. By the time we get to Jack Smight's Airport 1975, there is no old Hollywood veneer, and the cinematic content is absolutely minimal; the movie has a decidedly low-rent look, shot in Panavision but, in its production values and design, and most of its casting beyond its one real star (Charlton Heston), looks like an expensive made-for-TV feature. What is interesting from a sociological standpoint is the effort by the makers, in keeping with the sensibilities of the day, to acknowledge feminism -- whereas the 1970 movie's screenplay didn't quite know what to do with the idea of a female character in a position of authority, making Jean Seberg's character unattractive at times, and the butt of certain jokes in the script, Airport 1975 manages to put a stewardess played by Karen Black in the pilot's seat without hesitation, until stalwart hero Heston gets dropped into the stricken plane in mid-air. Airport '77, directed by Jerry Jameson, reached deeper into Hollywood's past, somewhat effectively in the case of Jack Lemmon as the pilot, and mixed the basic notion of suspense in the air with a caper plot about a heist gone wrong. And, finally, on its last gasp, David Lowell Rich's Airport '79: Concorde simply abandons all self-respect. Photographed in an anemic 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen and looking like a B-movie that wouldn't rate a prime-time showing on network TV, it's saddled with a script that's more jokey and obsessed with casual sex (and casual drug use) among its characters than the original movie's screenwriter or original author Arthur Hailey ever dreamt of; and it carries a cast that mostly (with all due respect to Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, and Andrea Marcovicci, none of whom belonged here), couldn't make an interesting episode of The Love Boat -- the salacious hot-tub scene between Marcovicci and John Davidson is particularly gross (as is the notion of any big-screen work by Davidson, clothed or not). Its visual highlight is a series of ridiculous aerobatics (including upside-down flying) by the Concorde, with accompanying shots of havoc among the passengers that look like test footage for Airplane! But the real value in the final film may be as an artifact of mainstream Hollywood's belated discovery of the sexual revolution, and a look back at pop-culture's flirtation with casual sex, before the election of Ronald Reagan and the advent of the AIDS epidemic, and awareness of other sexually transmitted diseases all contrived to put a damper on the mood and the behavior -- when characters, including heroes and heroines (at least, when one of the heroines was Sylvia Kristel), could engage in lives filled with recreational sex (and sex with prostitutes) without a seeming care in the world.

    On a technical level, each film gets 18 chapters, which is too little for the first and too many for the sequels, and each comes with its original trailer. All four movies are presented their original theatrical widescreen aspect ratios, and their soundtracks are rendered in the original mono and remixed Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround sound. Subtitles are available in English, French, and Spanish, and each of the double-sided platters opens automatically to a simple, easy-to-use menu. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:
  • Region: 1
  • Number of Discs: 2
  • Audio: PCM Stereo
  • Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
  • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (Cinemascope)
  • Features:
    • Original trailers
    • Production notes
AWARDS
  • Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  •     Won Best Art Direction - 1970 (Jack D. Moore, Preston Ames, Mickey Michaels, Alexander Golitzen)
  •     Won Best Supporting Actress - 1970 (Helen Hayes)
  •     Nominated Best Art Direction - 1977 (Mickey Michaels, George C. Webb)
  •     Nominated Best Costume Design - 1977 (Burton Miller, Edith Head)
  •     Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay - 1970 (George Seaton)
  •     Nominated Best Cinematography - 1970 (Ernest Laszlo)
  •     Nominated Best Costume Design - 1970 (Edith Head)
  •     Nominated Best Editing - 1970 (Stuart Gilmore)
  •     Nominated Best Original Score - 1970 (Alfred Newman)
  •     Nominated Best Picture - 1970 (Ross Hunter)
  •     Nominated Best Sound - 1970 (Ronald Pierce, David Moriarty)
  •     Nominated Best Supporting Actress - 1970 (Maureen Stapleton)
  • Hollywood Foreign Press Association
  •     Won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pic - 1970 (Maureen Stapleton)
  •     Nominated New Star of the Year - Female - 1974 (Helen Reddy)
  •     Nominated Best Original Score - 1970 (Alfred Newman)
  •     Nominated Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Pictu - 1970 (George Kennedy)
  •     Nominated Best Picture - Drama - 1970
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
REVIEWS:
  • Airport was widely lambasted by critics for its tried-and-true technique of showcasing a raft of Grand Hotel-style big-name box-office stars in a melodramatic thriller; Judith Crist called it "the best film of 1944." But no one could argue with its success or its influence. Director/screenwriter George Seaton displayed a masterful old hand's touch for showcasing stock characters in a soap opera format, adapting Arthur Hailey's blockbuster novel with Dean Martin as the pilot and a cast top-heavy with stars. Airport won huge audiences and six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, with veteran Helen Hayes, one of the first Oscar winners in 1932, winning a supporting award. The crowd-pleasing behemoth spawned almost a decade's worth of big-budget disaster films, including three inferior sequels, and then another round of disaster spoofs, beginning with 1980's Airplane! ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
  • Jack Smight's Airport 1975 was four years and a whole Hollywood world away from George Seaton's Airport. Gone were the likes of Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Van Heflin, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, Helen Hayes, et al., and, on the production end, Alfred Newman, Edith Head, Ernest Laszlo, Preston Ames. In their places were a more ragged, and even downright silly, cast (halfway toward the parody of Airplane!), and a threadbare-looking production -- at least by the standards of a feature film. Indeed, Airport 1975 seems like a hybrid, somewhere between a made-for-TV movie and a theatrical feature. It's shot in Panavision, but offers a John Cacavas score that sounds like a dry run for the music he wrote for Kojak. The opening credits also have a cheap, flat look about them, with minimal style to their design or care in their editing or structure, whereas Airport's opening credits were exciting, as well as a study in slick editing. Even the lack of crowds and extras make the sequel look more like something out of a movie-of-the-week.

    Once the movie actually gets going, it looks a little better, though the screen is filled with names that would mainly be associated with television in the years to come, including Erik Estrada, Norman Fell, Conrad Janis, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Sid Caesar, Ed Nelson, Beverly Garland, Christopher Norris, and Jerry Stiller, interspersed with such real movie veterans asMyrna Loy (trying to be this film's Helen Hayes) and Gloria Swanson, plus one former star (Dana Andrews) on his last legs. Add to all that one star treading water in his career (Charlton Heston); another collecting his biggest paychecks and on his way to the biggest billing of his career (George Kennedy); one pop singer (Helen Reddy) doing one of the most wretchedly miserable acting turns ever attempted by a vocalist; Linda Blair turning in a performance so frighteningly bad that she makes her role in The Exorcist look benign; and one genuinely talented actress (Karen Black) trapped in the middle of this mess, and you've got the makings for a real train-wreck of a movie.

    That's what happened on subsequent entries in the series, but what averts the same outcome here is the presence of a suspenseful plot supported by excellent special effects and aerial photography (which can only be appreciated seeing the film letterboxed) and the fact that the three stars and the lesser-known supporting players (such as Alan Fudge and John Lupton) perform well enough so that the movie leaps over the seemingly impossible chasm of its schlocky casting and production and a script so bad that it even has Sid Caesar's character making light of the drinking problem that blighted his life. Needless to say, this was not a movie that producer Jennings Lang was going to be proud of. Like Jaws 2, Jaws 3, etc. from the same studio, it was made to generate easy money for Universal. Interestingly enough, there is one supremely ironic moment early in the film that should have shown anyone involved just how far removed they were from producing anything of real cinematic value. The in-flight movie is George Lucas' American Graffiti, which showed a level of invention and a loose, free-flowing approach to cinematic storytelling that makes this movie seem all the poorer. Indeed, American Graffiti has rated a serious Special Edition DVD from Universal, whereas no one would ever seriously propose a such a release of Airport 1975. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
  • This movie represented the point in the Airport films from Universal at which they directly anticipated Jim Abrahams' Airplane! (1980) in look, execution, and content, and almost mapped out Abrahams' and the Zucker brothers' formula for the successful parodies. Indeed, the shots of the Concorde flying upside down and doing loops and rolls, with appropriate interior scenes depicting the havoc among the passengers, are almost indistinguishable from similar scenes in the Abrahams film and its sequel. Gone is any attempt at recalling the Hollywood glamor or glitziness of the original Airport; the whole movie -- except for one assassination scene early in the picture -- was instead marked by a made-for-television blandness and populated by B- and C-list non-celebrities, late-'70s pop-culture faces (Charo, Jimmie Walker, etc.), spiced with some old-time Hollywood faces (including Martha Raye in a very tiresome gag appearance), two good actors (Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson) actually trying to earn their paychecks amid this silliness, and the rest, including George Kennedy, walking through their roles. One could even question whether this movie belongs in the continuity with the other films in the series, since the Joe Patroni character portrayed here by Kennedy seems to have a completely different professional background from the character of that name that he played in Airport.

    One also wonders on what basis director David Lowell Rich was selected to direct this film -- could it have been the memory of his debut feature, the Three Stooges' Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959)? The scenes of the actors experiencing the havoc of upside-down flight and other aspects of aerial acrobatics (any of which would have ripped the real Concorde in two) are similar, and it takes a certain knack to get serious actors (as he did with Jerome Cowan et al. in the earlier movie) to engage in nonsense like this without cracking up. As a guide to American popular culture and social attitudes of the period, however, Airport '79: Concorde may also have taken on some unintended value in the decades since its release. The original Airport and its immediate sequel, made nine and five years earlier, respectively, showed an old-time moralizing and moralistic outlook in behavior and taste, both within the context of the action and the broader range of the movies' own orientations; Airport '79: Concorde is so free with its images of people having casual sex and talking about sex (all of this in the pre-AIDS era, almost a last gasp of the sexual revolution), and also casual drug use and other decadent activities, that it seems to emanate from a completely different society, or at least reflect an audience that had changed vastly in what it considered "entertainment" in those nine years. And the choice of Mercedes McCambridge as the coach of the Soviet women's gymnastics team is so knowing a piece of casting that it leads one to suspect that the makers of this movie knew, down to the last frame, exactly how much fun they were having with this last gasp in the series concept. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

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