Movie Review: Airplane! **1/2

It may have been a very near miss, but I am differing from Brent Hayward (a buddy from Advanced Camp) and the AFI on this review. The AFI ranked the disaster movie spoof "Airplane!" at spot #10 in its top 100 funniest movies ever. (“Some Like it Hot” was #1 and I heartily agree.) Sadly, the movie made in the year of my birth missed overall, though it had a few moments that were side-splitting, including the arguing loudspeaker voices at the airport and the frequent literal interpretations of expressions. (Doctor: We must get this girl to a hospital. Stewardess: A hospital? What is it? Doctor: It's a large building with patients, but that's not important now.) The best such gag came when the news reporters found out that the airplane was in trouble and invaded the office to interview the controllers. At the end they asked, "May we take some pictures?" and after the affirmative reply they emptied the walls of all of their framed photographs of airplanes and carried them out under their arms. Lloyd Bridges was a nervous controller whose stress increased with the peril of the plane. ("It looks like I picked the wrong week to stop smoking...drinking...taking amphetamines...sniffing glue.) Bridges and one other controller had the best scenes, I think.
Typically, a former fighter pilot, haunted by his war experiences has to take over the controls when the pilots and navigator come down with food poisoning. A storm is on, so the controllers got a veteran pilot to talk the pilot, whom he had known previously and hated, through the landing. Robert Hays played the pilot with a past and Julie Hagerty played the girl who couldn't marry him until he learned to deal with his past. Their former romance, with its flashback takeoffs on “Saturday Night Fever” and “From Here to Eternity” may have been "Airplane's" main Achilles' heel. Leslie Nielsen was typically humorous as the doctor, who delivers the "Win one for the Zipper" speech to get Hays to go through with the landing. Robert Stack as the veteran pilot had a memorable moment when he was trying to reach the terminal through the horde of religious types giving out flowers and asking for donations. He eventually had to punch and kick his way through them. As the plane is about to land, the runway landing lights go out, of course, but a grinning controller exclaims, "just kidding" and plugs the cord back in. Some ill taste in humor, (very ill in some cases) profane language and a highly unpleasant shock during the scene of bedlam in the airplane make "Airplane!" a movie that you might want to see once when you are "old enough." The TV version would be good, I think.