The Concorde: Airport '79

I recently mentioned the death of Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, and that she had appeared in The Concorde: Airport '79, which I have on Blu-ray as part of the box set of all four Airport movies. So with that in mind, I sat down to watch it and do a full-length review here.

The basic plot involves one of the Concorde supersonic passenger airplanes, which has been bought by an American airline and is going to go on its first flight for that airline from Washington DC to Paris, and from there to Moscow as a goodwill gesture ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow. (This was obviously made before the US and many other western countries boycotted the games.) Among the passengers on that flight are going to be a team of Soviet gymnasts, coached by Mercedes McCambridge and Avery Schreiber, with American reporter Robert Palmer (John Davidson, not singing "Addicted to Love" here) following along because he's trying to bed one of the gymnasts, I assume in the name of detente and world peace or something.

Another passenger is Maggie Whalen (Susan Blakely), another television reporter having an affair with the head of the Harrison defense contracting company, run by Dr. Harrison (Robert Wagner). Somebody passes documents to her, documents that show that the Harrison company has been illegally arming various militias in a bunch of third-world countries that at the time would have been the sites of proxy wars that were going on because of the Cold War. She's apparently planning to release those documents once she gets to Moscow. We've already seen that people are willing to kill to get those documents back, so when we learn that the Harrison company is going to be doing some testing of drone planes for air-to-air combat, Harrison gets the brilliant idea of using that drone to try to take down the Concorde!

The French Concorde pilot Metrand (Alain Delon), a notorious womanizer who is carrying on with one of the stewardesses Isabelle (Sylvia Kristel), along with the co-pilot Patroni (George Kennedy, who apparently learned how to fly the damn Concorde after every other unrelated job he had in the previous three Airport movies), evade the missile over the Atlantic and, with some minor damage, get the plane to Paris. Amazingly, you'd think that after the suffering the passengers went through on the first leg of the journey, they'd make alternative arrangements to get to Moscow, but no, they stupidly get back on the plane! Harrison tries to take it down again.

Now, this being a disaster movie, we know there should be a bunch of stars each getting a cameo story line. Among them are Eddie Albert as Sands, the head of the airline; Cicely Tyson as Elaine, who is going to Paris to fetch an organ for transplantation into her son; Martha Raye as an incontinent woman who keeps needing to use the bathroom; Jimmie Walker as a pot-smoking jazz musician who plays his saxophone during the first leg of the flight and then, after it gets destroyed, pickes up a fresh sax for the second leg (!!); and Charo as a woman trying to smuggle her dog onto the flight -- she should have called it her service dog. As for Andersson, she plays a high-class "escort" that Metrand procures for Patroni during their layover in Paris.

The Concorde was the last of the Airport movies, and it's easy to see why. It's terrible in oh so many ways. But it's one of those movies that's delightfully awful; you'll be splitting your sides laughing at the thought of it all. There are too many to list, although I've already mentioned everybody getting back on for the second leg as well as Jimmie Walker's second sax. There's the terrible special effects looking like a very primitive Chroma-key, and Patroni firing flares out the cockpit window (!) to try to deflect the heat-seeking missiles from the drone. I think my favorite moment involved Avery Schreiber's character bringing his young daughter into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Dad is translating in some sort of sign language for the daughter, while I was hoping Patroni would ask the girl if she likes gladiator movies.

I'm glad I picked up this box set, because all four of the movies are worth watching, even if only the original is really good. The other three reach varying levels of disaster in the figurative sense, and are all the more fun for it.