Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Everybody remembers Gwen from Airport (the original, that is, when it was plot enough to have a regular plane with a pregnant stewardess--no fancy water dives, Concordes or singing nuns for Arthur Hailey). She was the one who divided her time between stealing the little liquor bottles and getting it on with unhappily married pilot Dean Martin when the co-pilot left the cockpit. And then there was Earthquake, that child of the San Andreas fault, which co-starred Charlton Heston, a house that chased after its inhabitants and the marvels of Sensurround. And what about Hurricane, Avalanche...
There really isn't any plot here but that doesn't matter. The best choice these neophyte directors made was using serious actors. Aside from Graves, Robert "Name Your Game" Stack fills in as the pilot who's handed the assignment of guiding flight 209 to the ground and Lloyd "Sea Hunt" Bridges plays the glue-sniffing, heavy-drinking chain-smoking director of the Chicago airport. Mixed in with the emergency, as one might guess, is a romance between the Air Force pilot turned taxi driver, played by the ingenuous Robert Hays, and the stewardess who takes over...
...Surely you must be joking." "I told you not to call me Shirley."--then you'll enjoy the film. But don't go expecting Woody Allen or even Mel Brooks--there's something very anticlimatic about this film after all the media hype. As in most films where the plot is the background for the jokes, there are as many dull moments as there are funny ones...
...self-parodies anyway, the notion of making a satirical version of Airport and its three ridiculous sequels seems superfluous, if not impossible. But Airplane! may be this summer's most cheerful lunacy. Its style is basic collegiate raunch (imagine a disciplined Animal House or a frugal 1941). Its plot is an admitted rip-off of an even earlier example of the imperiled-airliner genre, 1957's Zero Hour. What is particular to the new film is its jostling comic inventiveness and pitch-black humor. The pilot and co-pilot (Peter Graves and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) are stricken...
UNLIKE MANY RECENT American movies, which often leave behind the sour aftertaste of burnt pizza, cute French petit-fours such as Coup de Tete impart no flavor at all. They slide down smoothly, provincial realism and honest emotion buried beneath the sweet, slick icing of a clever plot and anti-bourgeois humor...