MOVIE BLOG: AIRPLANE!, a satirical salute to the cinema

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The opening titles for AIRPLANE! emerge over an aerial view of a sea of clouds.

Suddenly, the tail of a jetliner passes across the screen quickly; then just as suddenly reverses itself and darts back and forth in a configuration that would be impossible for such a massive vehicle—but which is an unmistakable mimickry of the movement of the shark's fin in JAWS.

This sets the tone for a film which is really a movie about movies, a parody of filmdom's rottenest lines, most dizzyingly romantic scenes, most trite cinematic devices and most wooden stereotypes.

It often sinks to the level of adolescent—or at least collegiate—puns, sight-gags and scatological humor. But it whips up this material into such a storm that the sheer blizzard of silliness should be enough to knock many people out of their seats with laughter.

The plot of the film is based on a 1957 release called ZERO HOUR—about a commercial flight on which the passengers are food-poisoned, but are saved by a shell-shocked ex-pilot of a small aircraft who overcomes his fear and is guided to a landing by instructions from the ground.

AIRPLANE! also spins out parodies of the several AIRPORT films as well as SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (set in a seedy South Pacific bar), FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (the famous love scene in the surf) and throws an incidental reference to LA DOLCE VITA (dead fish on the beach).

Meanwhile, it parodies movies in general. The flashback technique is ridiculed, for example, when the hero (Robert Hays) recites the story of his love for one of the plane's stewardesses (Julie Hagerty) but is supposedly so boring that when we return to the present, the passenger next to him has hung herself.

Dialogue also gets a good going-over:

"It's quiet out there."
"Yeah. Too quiet."

And the whole movie-actor convention is unmasked when a little boy passenger comes up to the cockpit and insists that the co-pilot (played by basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabarr) is really a basketball star and not a co-pilot after all.

Casting is uniformly superb, including Lloyd Bridges as a beleagured airport manager ("I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue") and Peter Graves as the pilot ("Hey son, have you ever seen a grown man naked?")

The three people who wrote and directed this film, after five years and 40 rewrites, had the integrity to insist on complete artistic control over their product. The result is a comedy that is a lot slicker than their first film (KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, made up of 22 vignettes) and yet it is without the impersonality and blandness of the veneer usually supplied by Hollywood gag factories.

For the same reason that films attempting to push back cinematic frontiers deserve to be admired, AIRPLANE! is entitled to a lot of credit for its insistence on casting aside the inhibitions of most "sophisticated" Hollywood writers.

These three artists will try anything for a laugh—and some of the material flops—but it comes at you so fast that you should still find something funny at least every couple of minutes among the rubble of throwaway gags.

Indeed the material is often funny even when the jokes are telegraphed. They're designed to make you think, "Oh no. They're not REALLY going to do that." And yet they do. It's outrageous.

-Bruce Bailey
The Montreal Gazette,
July 12, 1980

Mr. Bailey's review is © 1980 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.