Maybe I missed something during the absolute euphoria of the last three weeks, but I’m not seeing anything online about the 50th anniversary of the apex of the “golden age” of disaster movies: the November/December 1974 releases of Airport 1975, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno. All were socko successes with ticket buyers (if not the picky, snooty critics), representing the absolute peak of the genre’s popularity in the 1970s.

By Paul Mavis

To young kids growing up in the early 70s, these movies were our Star Wars, before Lucas’ space opera (and two years prior to that, Spielberg’s Jaws), eclipsed these all-star disaster entertainments in the popular culture. I’ve written many times before that I had more fun, frankly, at Airport ’77 and Rollercoaster, than I did with R2-D2 and that bitchy queen robot during the first Star Wars summer.

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More than that, though, I’ve never really equaled the movie-related thrill I had in the last quarter of ’74, feeling like I was being shaken out of my Sensurround-equipped theater seat during Earthquake, and then seeing the only true “epic” disaster movie, The Towering Inferno, headlined by not one but two genuine A+-list international superstars, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman (if they were in it…then it had to be a “real” movie, not just schlock, my 9-year-old brain said). Maybe later seeing a restored Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm on a properly curved screen came close…but that was a more esthetic, rather than primal, thrill.

Now…did I feel this same thrill go up my leg (Obammy…your third term is over!) when, on opening night, October 18th, I sat down for the first release of 1974’s “Big Three Disasters,” Airport 1975? You bet your nonpareil Sno-Caps I did. As far as I was concerned, Charlton Heston was a god on screen—he could do no wrong (I hadn’t yet seen Counterpoint on TV…). After movies like Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Skyjacked, and Soylent Green, anything with him in it was “must see.”

Couple that with the fact that this outing was a sequel to 1970’s Airport, the glossy, starry Ross Hunter smash hit that re-ignited the disaster genre for the 1970s, and which had scored a massive TV audience when first shown the year before on ABC (I NyQuil-ed my parents’ Ovaltine so I could stay up and watch it). So of course I was psyched that October night…particularly after Universal Pictures’ shrill ad campaign, featuring gorgeous cross-eyed Karen Black screeching, “All flight crew is dead! Please help us!” right after Roy Thinnes’ dummy got sucked out of the cockpit, played constantly on TV.

Emancipated, sexy stew Nancy Pryor (Karen Black) is due to fly out of Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport on Columbia Airlines red-eye flight, 409. Meeting her boyfriend, Captain Al Murdock (Charlton Heston), Columbia’s chief flight instructor, in the Main Terminal, a clearly frustrated Nancy wants a few hours alone with Murdock to discuss their stalled relationship.

Smooth, in-charge, and completely unperturbed Murdock, on the other hand, has man’s work to do. So…he can “do wonders in 30 minutes” with Nancy, but that’s it as far as emotional commitment goes (when reminded that their “one-night stand” relationship is coming in at six years and counting, he blithely responds, “What’s the rush?”).

In a disaster movie, we have to have a varied cast of soon-to-die or soon-to-survive characters introduced to us, so we can establish an emotional connection with them when the shit starts to hit the fan. At least that’s the thought in Airport 1975…. Instead, we get a long list of former movie stars, former near-movie stars, former TV stars, and former near-TV stars, paraded before us so Columbia Flight 409’s seats are filled up for the Panavision screen.

First, we get genuine silent screen mega-has-been Gloria Swanson playing…herself, of all people. She’s putting the finishing touches on her autobiography, so we get pithy anecdotes and comments about Old Hollywood as she bores her assistant, Winnie (Planet of the Apes‘ p.o.a. Linda Harrison, under new name “Augusta Summerland”), to tears.

The flight crew is next. Moustachioed silver fox Captain Stacy (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) chuckles indulgently as his co-pilot, First Officer Urias (Roy Thinnes), comments on all the attractive tail crossing his path in the terminal (“Ohhhhhh….that’s nice. Nice, nice, nice” he murmurs through a cold, sneering face, as two brunettes wander by). Meanwhile, First Stew Nancy chuckles indulgently as blonde good girl “teenager” Stewardess Bette (Christopher Norris) asks her if they have a “sexy crew” that evening.

Married Flight Engineer Julio (Erik Estrada), directly behind them on the escalator, barely holding onto the handrail due to muscle control failure via blood loss to his 24 hour-a-day erection, can’t stop licking his chops or checking out the stew’s asses as Steward Gary (Ken Sansom), quite correctly states, “they sure have all the right equipment.”

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Comic relief is supplied by three drunks heading to Hell-A: Sam, Bill, and Arnie (Jerry Stiller, Norman Fell, and Conrad Janis). Loudly making asses of themselves, providing chuckles for the audience as they make bad jokes and burp their way through the various airport lounges, they introduce us to pro drinker Mrs. Devaney (Myrna Loy). Her love of boilermakers provides inexplicably uproarious “gee…isn’t that old lady funny?” gags in the same vein as Helen Hayes’ stowaway in the original Airport. She’ll make friends with sweaty (it’s not the booze, it’s the pills…), sorta-wisecrackin’ actor Barney (sweaty, pill-popping Sid Caesar), who’s along for the ride just to see his own cameo in the in-flight movie.

Newly exorcised, jaundiced little girl Janice Abbott (Linda Blair—they couldn’t just throw a little key light on her?), has a kidney waiting for her in L.A.. Hoisted onto the plane like a sack of potatoes, she’s accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Abbott (Nancy Olson), who does nothing the entire movie but wring her hands. Sweet little Janice will befriend folk/rock-singing nun Sister Ruth (Helen Reddy), who earnestly believes everything will work out if everyone listens to her song about being one’s own best friend (she unfortunately is not the first to die…).

And finally, we have Mrs. Joe Patroni (lovely Susan Clark, in a most unflattering perm) and her enthusiastic-about-everything young son, Joseph (Brian Morrison). If the name “Patroni” sounds familiar, you’re right—they’re the wife and son of Airport‘s original Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), now Vice-President in Charge of Operations for Columbia Airlines. And yes, he’s just as lovably gruff and grotesque as he was in the first movie—especially when he starts “to act” when his family is endangered.

And what a danger they’re in! You see, salesman Scott Freeman (Dana Andrews) is rained out in Gallup, New Mexico, and if he doesn’t get his ass up in his Beechcraft Baron and get to Boise, Idaho that night (the only known instance of anyone really needing to go to Boise), he’s going to lose out on half a year’s worth of sales commission. So after a call to his lovely wife, Mrs. Scott Freeman (Beverly Garland, utterly wasted in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo), it’s off into the wild black yonder with Scott…despite being told by his buddies his color is “off.”

He should have listened to them. With his and Columbia’s flights diverted to Salt Lake City because of the weather, Scott has a heart attack (it’s either that, or that Speedway burrito) and slams right into Columbia’s cockpit, rather forcefully ejecting the co-pilot, squashing the navigator under a busted control panel, and gorily blinding the pilot. So who’s left to fly the plane?

You got it: Head Stew Nancy. And she does okay…until her flighty female emotions get the better of her and she realizes she’s in way over her head, and the only thing left to do is to mid-air drop a man on a tether into the cockpit and land that mother.

Even though 1980’s Airplane! delightfully skewered most of its unintentionally hilarious aspects, Airport 1975 is one of those bad/good movies that never fails to yield new laughs whenever it’s re-watched. In this highly ironic age, though, it’s important to remember that most people didn’t respond to this blockbuster as unintentional camp when it premiered fifty years ago. I certainly didn’t as a kid—I took it entirely straight, and was thrilled by its storyline and execution.

And I would imagine that most people, despite the script’s and performers’ more obvious overstepping, received it as intended, as well: an action thriller with big stars that (mostly) delivered the goods. It was the seventh most popular movie of 1974 in the U.S., making the equivalent of over $650 million worldwide (adjusted for inflation). That didn’t happen because everyone was “in” on some joke.

To be fair, though, no matter how primed I was before this came out, as an already seasoned TV watcher, I remember sitting front row center at Showcase Cinemas back in 1974 (“Acres of Free Parking! Giant Wall to Wall Screens! Spacious Reclining Rocking Chair Seats!”), and thinking right off the bat that Airport 1975 seemed more like an ABC Movie of the Week, blown up on the big screen, rather than as an organically-conceived theatrical release. Which it was, essentially (the script had originally been presented as a MTV, but producer Jennings Lang saw it, decided to boost its budget primarily through a star cast, and put it out in theaters with fingers crossed).

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That MTV label certainly wouldn’t have been a pejorative for me (how could it be, with all the memorable MTVs that were coming out almost weekly on the small tube?). It wasn’t just the flat, blocky, TV heads-in-center-frame look of Airport 1975 that reminded me of television, due perhaps more to the director, Jack Smight, who never made a big screen movie that couldn’t comfortably fit on the smaller, square TV screens of the day (The Third Day, Harper, No Way to Treat a Lady), rather than the once-brilliant cinematographer, Philip H. Lathrop, of Touch of Evil and Point Blank fame. It was the construction of Airport 1975 itself: individual vignettes timed less for dramatic impact and more for future commercial breaks.

And because it felt more like TV rather than a “movie” movie, I remember not getting all that upset with my old man cracking half-whispered asides and jokes about some of Airport 1975‘s failures (not a Heston fan, sadly). After all…that’s what one did in our house, when watching TV. Despite taking movies far too seriously then, I couldn’t help laughing at some of the things he said…and if I did that, it meant I wasn’t taking Airport 1975 all that seriously.

That didn’t mean I didn’t find the movie hugely entertaining. But I certainly understand people now thinking Airport 1975 was an intended goof, right from the start. Even 14-year-old Linda Blair knew a dog when she saw one (“I wish they’d just cut me out of it,” was her post-viewing verdict).

Before you feel smug about seeing Airport 1975 for how it plays now, read Heston’s journals—he knew right from the get-go this movie was no more than cashing a paycheck (as I’m sure did others in the cast and crew). He knew the script was junk, and that it involved no acting from him (“They want me in the film so they’ll have someone they can bill over the 747, I suppose….There’s no real acting scenes in it for me,”).

It apparently was rushed into production (I’m betting everyone wanted to stick as close to the original intention of making a quickie MTV production, thereby saving a bunch of balloons), and produced efficiently if not carefully (as an example, Heston and stunt coordinator Joe Canutt knew the rigging of the cockpit collision was fake-looking with the dummies…but it was too late in the schedule to re-rig for stuntmen).

For most of Airport 1975‘s runtime, the only distraction from the careless production is the frequently inept, unwittingly amusing dialogue. The scene that absolutely has to work in Airport 1975 is the crash scene…and that’s largely botched, with the perspective of Dana Andrews’ small plane all wrong in the rear-projection of the cockpit window (it looks like it’s just hovering there, instead of whooshing into the plane), and of course that laughable dummy flying out the hole (I mean the actual dummy, not terrible actor Roy Thinnes).

After you’re finished watching it, you start to go back over all the spots that initially made you scratch your head. Weren’t they only 20 minutes from Salt Lake, when they were ready to land? Yet it takes another hour or more for them to finally hit the airport? What’s with Olson sensing a disturbance in the force, when she regards Blair’s guitar strings humming? Trouble in engine #3? Okay…how does that factor with a small plane hitting them? A red herring…or supernatural foreshadowing? And seriously: they couldn’t do one extra take, to make sure Sid Caesar jerked to the right in sync with all the other passengers, when the plane was careening all over the tarmac?

None of that compares to the dialogue, courtesy of TV writer Don Ingalls. At least “courtesy of,” except for Gloria Swanson, who reportedly wrote all her own dialogue (she most likely didn’t, but Ingalls probably said, “That kind of credit I don’t need!”). Weirdly greased up yet pale and swathed in hoods and wraps, Swanson comes dangerously close to Norma Desmond territory when she goes on and on about flying with DeMille, doing loop da loops to see the moon upside down (the only viewers who could possibly appreciate that gayest of gay Airport franchise dialogue, would be the cast of The Boys in the Band).

Swanson’s like that lady you accidentally get stuck with in the grocery line who blathers on and on about something or other from her past that’s supposed to fascinate you, while you look for the Ronsonol and a Bic to immolate yourself. Her best here? “I will not have poisoned food! I don’t like it!” Well, to quote Luther Heggs’ mother: “I’d rather eat good food than bad food any day.”

When Christopher Norris figures out that a clearly delusional Captain Efrem wants to “help” them fly the plane, I remember getting unintended laughs from surrounding people when I stated a little too loudly to my old man, “No, he means he wants help getting the ground glass out of his eyes—he can’t ‘help’ anyone!” And everything George Kennedy says is a hoot…which is probably just as much his fault.

Kennedy’s so bad when he does that jiggly anger, screwing up his face and mouth, and trying to spit out lines while pretending to hold his gigantic rage in check. It’s always good for a laugh. His best? “Sometimes the public’s right to know gives me a huge pain the ass!” Well let me tell you something—that has to be a pretty big pain, after seeing his retreating Farah slacks (added bonus: watch him try and “hop” his bulk on a racing fire engine. Classic).

The easiest line of criticism for today’s critics to pick up is the rampant “sexism” on display in Airport 1975 (contemporary critics commented on it, too). My biggest problem isn’t the sexism itself (when the biggest laughs in today’s so-called pro-feminist comedies involve women objectifying men and feeling empowered by acting exactly like their leering, mercenary, aggressive counterparts, I’m not too worried about how men acted in 50-year-old movies). It’s how poorly the guys employ it.

Watch the women in Airport 1975. They’re totally onto the guys, rolling their eyes in amused disgust at their attempts to be hip and sexy. When Heston repeatedly belittles Black’s attempt to emotionally connect with him, she makes it very clear his attitude isn’t what she wants. When the crew gets coffee in the cockpit before takeoff, Black and Norris alternately laugh and snort in derision when Thinnes throws out lines like, “The trouble with [one man woman] Nancy is she never learned to rise above her principles,” followed by, “What a waste of talent.”

She’s not offended, because she already knows what a pig he is. And he knows she knows. When Ponch chases out Norris with the all-time classic, “I like my coffee sweet, mommy. Huh? Huh?” the audience laughs not at Norris’ dilemma, but at what a cheesy clown he is. And they did that back in 1974, too.

I love what a 70s chad Heston is, but there’s no denying he’s hysterical whenever he’s groaning out one classic bad line after another, particularly when the word, “baby,” is included. When first meeting up with Black, it’s hard to figure out where to look, considering those Panavision-sized chompers and that checked suit that looks straight off the Mr. Haney line of Music Man-inspired business wear (when you factor in Black’s wonky eye, the diversion from the piss-poor dialogue is complete). His imploring, hideously ersatz-sexy “Look baaaaaaby,” sets the tone for the whole movie (he redeems himself sartorially, at least, with that bright yellow turtleneck and the cargo jacket. When he folds back the cuffs once?…sublime).

Talking her through piloting the massive jumbo 747 is Airport 1975‘s most amusing sequence. Sounding immediately pissed with her, that repeated, “honey…” dripping with barely-contained rage, Heston gets the biggest laugh when telling her about the autopilot, which she naturally reaches for before he yells, “Don’t touch it!”, ending with him losing it, screaming “Goddammit answer!” when Black freezes up at the wheel (that’ll calm her down!) Fair play, though: when she manages to avoid that huge mountain on her own, we’re given the greatest close-up of Heston as he groans in post-Greatest Story Ever Told ecstasy, “Climb, baaaaaby….cliiiiiiiiimb.”

Then again…who wouldn’t yell at Black, considering the dumb things they have her do (actually…is it really sexist to say she’s made to look dumb because she’s a woman? Wouldn’t anyone act that way, faced with trying to fly a loaded jumbo 747 with zero experience? Who wouldn’t panic and flail around?). Oh my god that screeching voice! (and no, Pauline, they didn’t alter her voice to make men hate her. What a loon).

And I don’t remember Heston telling her it was okay to start fucking juggling shit and ripping out panels and wires (she zaps the radio, that idiot). Sticking her tongue out, though, seems to help pull in doomed tiny pilot, Ed Nelson (what a thankless role). Finally thankful to have her man take over (wouldn’t anyone feel that way, glad to be rid of all responsibility while an expert takes over? That’s sexist how?), when Heston puts Shaft and Bond to shame by smoothly dismissing her with, “Go do your thing, baaaaaby,” [i.e.: telling the passengers to get ready to die], she smiles right through her wet panties and hustles her ass out of there but fast, while Heston grimaces as only he could in the early 70s, and lands that mother. It’s exciting, it’s suspenseful, it’s silly, and it’s hysterically funny. Who would be offended by all that?

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

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