The Concorde - Airport '79.

Release Date: Aug. 17, 1979. Running Time: 113 minutes. Screenplay: Eric Roth. Producer: Jennings Lang. Director: David Lowell Rich.


THE PLOT:

The night before she is scheduled to fly to Europe, television reporter Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) receives a late night visitor: Carl Parker (Macon McCalman), who works for her lover, arms dealer Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner). Carl informs Maggie that Harrison has been selling weapons to Communist countries, just before being killed by a hit man.

When Maggie receives the evidence just before stepping onto her Concorde flight, Harrison decides he will need to silence her. He determines the most efficient way to do this will be by waiting until she lands and having a hit man shoot her with a sniper rifle. Nah, just kidding! He sabotages a drone test to try to shoot down the Concorde, and arranges as a backup a rogue fighter plane to shoot the passenger jet with a missile on its way into Paris. Leaving pilots Paul Metrand (Alain Delon) and Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) resorting to desperate evasive maneuvers to keep the plane in one piece!

Joe Patroni graduates to co-pilot opposite Alain Delon, who is likely wondering what he's doing here.

CHARACTERS:

Paul Metrand: French star Alain Delon leads the international cast as Metrand, who of course is in the midst of an on-again, off-again affair with the fetching Isabelle (Emmanuelle's Sylvia Kristel). He's French, he's a capable pilot, he takes his coffee black, and he's quite happy to call a man he's known literally for hours "a friend" and hook him up with a prostitute. These traits don't add up to him being a well-developed character, however; and though a capable actor, Delon lacks the intrinsic screen presence possessed by Charlton Heston, or even the original's miscast Dean Martin, leaving him the weakest of the Airport leads.

Patroni: "They don't call it the cock-pit for nothin', sweetheart!" For viewers of Airport '77 who missed the cheesy and sexist dialogue of the earlier films... Have no fear, Patroni is here! George Kennedy enters the film dropping bombshells like the above while cackling at his own jokes, coming across as the ugliest of "Ugly Americans." Rather than only barely tolerating this boorish, overbearing sadsack, the other characters appear to genuinely enjoy being around him! Meanwhile, Patroni's career path has grown even more bizarre. In this film, he has somehow not only become a pilot, but it turns out he's been one all along! So much for the first film assuring us that "he's licensed to taxi."

Maggie Whelan: Susan Blakely, a veteran of such TV soapers as Rich Man, Poor Man seems at home in these shallow waters. She is able to remain sympathetic, despite her material being every bit as stupid as that of her co-stars ("I love you so much," she coos to corrupt industrialist Robert Wagner the day after his hit man chased her onto the roof of her home). Her role is ridiculously passive. You would think the film could get some mileage by having her use her time on the ground to investigate or follow up on the explosive information she's been given - you know, like a real journalist would do. Instead, she goes out to dinner with Wagner. Not to try to get more information or to ask for his version of events, but to weep over the end of their implausible relationship!

Kevin Harrison: At least Robert Wagner knows what kind of film he's in, and leans fully into the cheese. There's a scene right after Blakely has boarded the tram to take her to her flight. He walks along the terminal, watching her through the glass as she peruses the documents, keeping pace with the shuttle to keep her in view while "bad guy music" plays in the background. It's pure melodrama that could only be improved by Leslie Nielsen arriving on the scene to make an arrest. Meanwhile, Mr. Harrison's convoluted attempts to shoot down The Concorde show that he went to the Dr Evil school of movie villainy. His target is one person, and she has a Paris layover during which she would be 100% vulnerable to a professional hit... but he insists on putting all of his eggs into the "Bring down The Concorde!" basket.

Crew and Passengers: The third member of the flight crew is a young David Warner, who manages to imbue his underwritten role with a non-abrasive good humor. Passengers include: Cicely Tyson as the hilariously distraught mother of a 7-year-old who needs a heart transplant (the heart is aboard, in a container labeled "HUMAN HEART"); Eddie Albert, wildly over-the-top as the airline's cowboy-like owner, flying with his young trophy wife (Sybil Danning); Andrea Marcovicci as a Russian gymnast who has fallen in love with an American journalist; Martha Raye as this film's "comedy old lady," complete with bladder and drinking problems; and Jimmie Walker as a saxophone-playing, pot-smoking stereotype. One wonders if screenwriter Eric Roth (yes, Forrest Gump's Eric Roth) was deliberately sending up the ludicrous story brief he'd been given.

The bad guy (Robert Wagner), who is evil, poses evilly in a moment of evil pensiveness.

THOUGHTS:

From the opening moments, The Concorde: Airport '79 screams "tacky." The film had a generous-for-its-day $14 million budget, making it more than twice as expensive as either of the previous sequels. All that money must have gone to the shots of the Concorde in flight, because this is by far the cheapest-looking entry in the series. Camera setups are more befitting of the small screen than the large, as is the cast. Even the opening titles seem out of a TV show - bright red, in italics, with much of the cast literally billed as "Guest Stars," as if gathered for a feature-length episode of The Love Boat. There's even a cameo by Charo!

The unintentional laughs are made even more manifest by some of the shooting and editing choices. The man who brings Susan Blakely the documents is shot from the doorway of her home (which was conveniently left open), in a sequence that could be transplanted into Get Smart! without seeming out-of-place. Then Blakely hides from the hitman by plastering herself on the glass roof. Because of course she has a glass roof. Later, the airplane dodges first the drone, then the missiles of the fighter plane. Instead of staying in the cockpit, the movie repeatedly cuts back to the passengers, screaming as they spin like clothes through a laundry machine.

Later comes a chase through a Paris airport, in which a criminal manages to bump into and knock down as many people as possible. It's pure Naked Gun fodder, made all the funnier by the other passersby, who show not even the mildest reaction to the pandemonium. The chase ends with the man actually running out onto the runway in front of the Concorde while it is taking off! Oh, and none of the characters ever even remarks on how odd it is that their flight keeps being targeted by these accidents, incidents, and apparent terrorist strikes. Not even our bizarrely uninquisitive news reporter.


THE NETWORK TELEVISION VERSION

As with Airport '77, this film was expanded for its network television broadcast through a mixture of deleted scenes and newly-shot footage. This might not qualify as the most drastically altered network TV version ever (the Charlton Heston/John Cassavetes thriller Two-Minute Warning had its entire last act changed for its small screen debut).  Still, it might just be the most bizarre.

An entire subplot has been added to the movie, involving a police and INTERPOL investigation into Robert Wagner's bad guy.  The investigation is started by the wife of the murdered executive, who goes to the police after giving the evidence to Susan Blakely.  This begs the question of exactly why she went to the reporter in the first place.  Presumably, she went to the same school of overcomplicated planning that Wagner's character attended. Speaking of Wagner, his character gets a whole new ending in the television version - presumably to fill more air time, as his fate basically is the same in both edits.

Oh, there's also a flashback to Patroni with his family, in which his soon-to-be-dead wife (Jessica Walter) has premonitions about the Concorde's many travails. Though after the previous three Airport movies, it probably doesn't take psychic abilities to guess that putting George Kennedy anywhere near a plane is a bad idea...

Presumably where all the production money went...

OVERALL:

Just two years after the success of Airport '77 made it seem as if this series would last forever, The Concorde - Airport '79 brought the franchise to a crashing halt with a film that failed to even recoup its production budget. This movie is tacky, stupid, and cheap-looking. It is watchable - but mainly for the unintentional camp value.


Overall Rating: 3/10. What can I say? They saved the worst for last.

Preceded by: Airport '77



Review Index

To receive new review updates, follow me on Twitter:
Follow @RandomMusings09