The Concorde: Airport '79 - Universal's Floundering Franchise's Final Flight

Considering the ever-decreasing amount of realism and quality in Universal Studio's Airport series, I'm willing to bet that the late Arthur Hailey, in the moments when he wasn't writing soapy novels or screenplays, sometimes had second, third, and even fourth thoughts about having sold the film rights to his original soapy-but-at-least-credible best selling novel Airport to producer Ross Hunter. True, Hailey's novels are in the same literary level as Sidney Sheldon's or, dare I say, Danielle Steel, but at least the first film of the airplane-in-distress franchise was good enough to earn over $40 million in the U.S. alone and earned various Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture (it didn't win) and Best Supporting Actress (Helen Hayes, who did win).

Although movie studios, like all business enterprises, have always been interested in making big profits for their owners and stockholders, the Changing of Hollywood in the late 1960s that saw the retirement of the Zanucks and the Warners and the handing over of 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal, and Columbia Pictures to companies like Coca Cola and Music Corporation of America meant that people who did not know anything about film making were now running America's Dream Capital.

Everything, it seemed, now centered on demographics, box-office gross, and, unfortunately, the deadly trend of exploiting a good-to-excellent "property" (Planet of the Apes, Jaws, Superman, American Graffiti) for every nickel and dime possible even if, as in the case of the Airport series, each chapter was worse than the one that preceded it and earned less money. (According to the Internet Movie Database, The Concorde: Airport '79 only grossed $13 million in the United States during its theatrical run. How about that for diminishing returns?)

Having watched (twice!) Airport '77 at the movies and thinking that the series could get no sillier, I wisely avoided wasting my-then substantial $2.00 ticket money by going to the nearest two- or three-screen theater to catch The Concorde: Airport '79, I had remained blissfully ignorant about this turkey of a flick's bizarre and contrived storyline, awful directing, even worse acting, and incredibly bad casting. (Charo? For Pete's sake, why would anyone cast Charo in anything but cheesy 1970s TV shows a la Fantasy Island or, jeez, The Love Boat?)

But such bliss had to end someday, and for me it happened when my friends Ivan and Danny went out of town for a conference and asked me to cat-sit. Knowing I write reviews for Epinions, they also gave me permission to look through their DVD library, which is far more extensive than mine. This I did, and among such titles as Salon Kitty, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Flightplan, I spied The Concorde: Airport '79.

As bad as Airport '77 is, its plot of a 747 that somehow sinks pretty much intact in the Atlantic Ocean cruises at the same lofty levels of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in comparison to The Concorde: Airport '79, which stars France's Alain Delon as Captain Paul Metrand and (inexplicably) George Kennedy as Captain Joe Patroni, the only carryover character from the other Airports and, by the powers invested to screenwriter Eric Roth (Ali, Munich), transformed from chief ground crew and operations manager to a fully-rated Concorde pilot.

Roth and director David Lowell Rich must have been on a particularly strange mindset when they were working on this SST (Stupid Silly Turkey), or perhaps they had been kidnapped by the same aliens that allegedly took off with Elvis Presley a few years before, because there is no other explanation for the sheer awfulness of Airport '79. They must have had a huge list of discarded ideas (plane gets eaten by a Yeti, plane gets attacked by a great white shark because a Brody family member is aboard, plane is taken over by Darth Vader) before they came up with this scenario:

First up, a radical Greenpeace-like group of environmentalists wants to prevent the Concorde from landing in Washington, D.C. by doing the aerial equivalent of blocking a whaling vessel with rubber boats - they want to block a runway by using a, get this, a hot air balloon. How this is going to deter a supersonic transport from landing at a major airport is beyond anyone with half a brain, but that is the radical environmentalists' brilliant plan.

Second, screenwriter Roth (or his Thalaxian double) follows the Airport by-the-numbers formula by focusing on various romantic/sexual entanglements, including Capt. Metrand's dalliances with hot stewardess Isabelle (Emmanuelle's Sylvia Kristel) and John Davidson's Robert Palmer's alarmingly creepy trysts with Russian gymnast Alicia Rogov (Andrea Marcovicci, whose Russian accent is only slightly funnier than co-star Mercedes McCambridge's outfit of oversized smock and scarf).

The Delon-Kristel subplot of chief pilot boffing the chief stewardess is, along with Joe Patroni's presence, is a tired echo of Airport and Airport 1975, while the Davidson-Marcovicci liaison is both weird and an attempt to cash in on the not-yet-boycotted Summer Olympics scheduled to take place the following year in Moscow. (The Olympic angle also explains the appearance of comedian Avery Schreiber as, of all things, a Russian Olympic team coach.)

Third, having decided that maybe it would not be a good idea to feature sharks or wayward Yeti as the flick's cause de disastre, Roth figured out that maybe having a villain from the James Bond School of Nefarious Industrialists would be the best solution to the question of "how do we place the Concorde in jeopardy?" Enter It Takes a Thief's Robert Wagner as Dr. Kevin Harrison, a handsome, wealthy weapons manufacturer who is, in the tradition of Blofeld and Auric Goldfinger, out to make a fast billion or so bucks by selling weapons to The Wrong People.

But after Harrison's TV-reporter girlfriend Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) witnesses the murder of a Harrison Industries whistleblower, escapes from the killer and is handed evidence of the Bad Doctor's dastardly dealings, Wagner's character goes into full-blown villain mode and hatches no less than three separate attempts to stop Concorde-flying Maggie from spilling the beans, all of them involving the destruction (by various means) of the passenger-laden Anglo-French supersonic transport.

Mayhem and unintentional madcap comedy ensue, as Delon and Kennedy manfully fly the Concorde as if they were driving an F-15 fighter and attempting such missile-evading tactics as firing a flare to decoy a heat-seeker and (amazingly) shutting off the airliner's engines to reduce its heat signature.

All the while, all the wild maneuvers violently toss and throw the cast-offs from a Love Boat casting call, including a lost-looking Eddie Albert as the airline owner and Playboy Playmate of the Year Sybil Danning as his trophy wife, Jimmie Walker of TV's Good Times as a pot-smoking jazz sax player, and, inexplicably, Charo as an English-mangling cuchi-cuchi passenger who is attempting to bring her chihuahua on board the plane against airline regulations.

To call this movie woefully inept is a gross understatement. Roth, who obviously has written better films both before and after The Concorde: Airport '79, crams way too many plot twists that are insanely inane for this movie to be even enjoyable trash. For instance, after your plane somehow survived attacks by a drone and a jet fighter and you were tossed all over the cabin, would you board the same plane for the next leg of a flight? I didn't think so, but that's what all the passengers of this flight do, probably because they don't want to miss the Moscow Olympics. The story is bad, the acting is mediocre at best, and the dialog is absolutely the pits.

Isabelle: You pilots are such... men.
Capt. Joe Patroni: Well, they don't call it a "cockpit" for nothing.

Fortunately for the moviegoing public, when this movie crashed and burned at the box office, a modicum of sanity returned to Universal's head offices and we were spared from Airport '81: The Yeti Ate Flight 19. The Thalaxians returned with the real Eric Roth, who went on to write or co-write The Onion Field, Forrest Gump, The Horse Whisperer, and the Michael Mann biopic of Muhammad Ali, with the proviso that Charo be confined to Hollywood Squares and GEICO commercials.


The Concorde: Airport '79 Partial Cast List


Alain Delon .... Capt. Paul Metrand
Susan Blakely .... Maggie Whelan
Robert Wagner .... Dr. Kevin Harrison
Sylvia Kristel .... Isabelle
George Kennedy .... Capt. Joe Patroni
Eddie Albert .... Eli Sands
Bibi Andersson .... Francine
Charo .... Margarita
John Davidson .... Robert Palmer
Andrea Marcovicci .... Alicia Rogov