Disaster movies were hugely popular throughout the 1970s. They featured large casts full of classic actors and young, up and comers. They had big budgets and featured state-of-the-art special effects. Certainly there existed disaster films before the 1970s, and they periodically remain popular to this day, but the 1970s were truly the heyday of the genre.
Buy The Concorde… Airport ’79 4K UHDAirport (1970) essentially invented the 1970s disaster movie. It certainly created the template for most of the films that followed it for a decade. If that is true, then you could say that The Concorde…Airport ’79 (1979) effectively killed the genre. A year later, Zucker, Abrams & Zucker’s spoof of the genre, Airplane! (1980) buried it with a riotous, laugh-a-minute wake.
The problem that so many sequels have, across every kind of genre, is that the filmmakers seem to always think bigger is better. They add in bigger action, bigger explosions, more danger, more melodrama, etc., and very rarely do any of those things make the movie any better. What sequels so often forget is that what makes a film truly memorable is a good story with interesting characters. Forget about those, and no amount of action will turn the film into something enjoyable.
The original Airport‘s disaster was a snowstorm and a little guy with a little bomb. But the film was good because it paid attention to the story. We cared about that little guy and so many of the other characters. I mean, it wasn’t Shakespeare, but it had heart. The sequels spend less and less time building characters and more time inventing the disaster. Much to the detriment of the films.
This, the fourth film in the series, begins with a missile attack, follows that with jet fighters trying to blow our plane out of the air, and concludes with a mechanical gizmo opening the cargo door nearly tearing the plane apart. In between are some bits and pieces of a story, and a pretty great collection of international actors as supporting characters you’ll forget before the credits even begin to roll.
Before I put this movie on, I asked my wife if she wanted to watch it with me. She jokingly replied that she would, but only if “it had a handsome actor in it.” Having not actually read anything about the film, I replied that it would probably have someone handsome, but since this was the fourth film in the franchise, I wouldn’t expect an A-list hottie.
Friends, the film stars Alain Delon, one of the most handsome men to have ever existed. I guess you could say my wife missed out. Or maybe I got lucky and didn’t have to listen to her gush over him the entire time.
Delon plays Captain Paul Metrand, our heroic pilot. He’s assisted by our faithful (and only continuing character of the series) Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), who has now been upgraded to copilot. I say upgraded even though in the last film he was a vice president, and in Airport there is a bit of a fuss made because he’s not licensed to fly a plane, only authorized to taxi across the runway. Here, he claims to have flown every conceivable type of aircraft and even served as a pilot in Vietnam. But expecting these films to have any kind of continuity is probably asking a bit too much.
Our villain is Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner), an arms dealer who has been selling weapons to lots of different bad guys. His wife is given some papers by a whistle-blowing employee that will prove these evil shenanigans. She, of course, boards our fated Concorde aircraft, setting her, the plane, and us on a course for disaster.
During a scheduled missile test, Harrison reprograms the weapon to attack the Concorde rather than the remote-controlled aircraft it was supposed to hit. Evasive maneuvers from Patroni and Metrand (plus a little assistance from the U.S. military) keep the missile from blowing up the Concorde. Harrison then (and you can almost see him twirling his mustache at this point) sends a jet fighter to attack the Concorde before it lands in Paris.
It is at this point in the film you may be tempted to ask yourself questions like, why aren’t the military or possibly the FBI questioning Harrison about his missile that went so terribly off course? Or, since someone is clearly trying to blow up the Concorde, why do the French authorities not ground the aircraft and launch an investigation? Or at the very least, who in their right mind would board the Concorde the next day when it flies to Russia? I must recommend you avoid these temptations. The film is simply not interested in answering them, and your enjoyment will only go up if you avoid asking them.
Nearly all the passengers from the original flight do once again board the aircraft and fly to Moscow. That’s when Harrison uses a remote gizmo to open the cargo door, ripping half the fuselage apart in the process. Our hero Metrand narrowly lands the plane on a ski slope in the Swiss Alps and saves the day. I suppose that counts as spoilers, but it hardly ruins the film.
The action is filmed well enough. It is more or less exciting. But the only character worth caring about is Joe Partroni, and that’s only because we’ve gotten to know him a bit over the course of four films. I love Alain Delon, but Captain Metrand is barely a character. They give him a love interest (Sylvia Kristel) and allow him a couple of scenes where he does more than spout flying jargon, but it isn’t enough to make me care.
The cast is filled out by the usual cavalcade of stars (although by this point you can feel them straining to find anyone of real interest). Eddie Albert is the airline bigwig who spends more of his time chasing women than doing any real work. Bibi Andersson is a sex worker that shows Patroni a good time while they are in Paris. Jimmie Walker blows on a saxophone a couple of times and smokes a joint in the john. John Anderson is a reporter who’s also in love with a Russian gymnast (the film gives us a little business about the Moscow Olympics and a pretty tame hot-tub scene between the gymnast and Anderson – which is about as deep as any of the character and plot development goes in this film). Even Charo shows up at some point, just to give us a gag about her hiding a little dog inside her fur muff. None of it amounts to much. Nobody is given more than a couple of scenes, and most of those just set up lame gags.
The film actually did well at the box office, making some $65 million on a $14 million budget, but you can see the writing on the wall. Disaster movies were on the way out. We can be thankful Airplane! came out the following year and saved us from an even more disastrous sequel.
Kino Lorber presents The Concorde…Airport ’79 with a new HDR/Dolby Vision Master – From a 4K Scan of the 35mm Original Camera Negative with a 5.1 Surround and Lossless 2.0 audio track on a triple-layered UHD100 Disc. Extras include an audio commentary from film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson and some theatrical trailers. Also included is a Blu-ray disc.
It should be noted that Kino Lorber is releasing a boxed set of all four Airport films in October.
