The Concorde...Airport '79 (1979)

It's easy to knock low budget movies for being bad - there's a whole industry out there devoted to it: all those TV and internet shows with supposed critics offering their supposedly witty and amusing commentaries on such productions.  (Although, one has to say, if the films in question really are as unintentionally hilarious due to their alleged ineptitude, why it is necessary for these self-appointed wits to have to laboriously point out all of the 'funny' bits to us?).  But the fact is that these next-to-no-budget films are, by their very nature, likely to be of pretty dubious quality.  Their lack of resources makes that more or less inevitable.  Much more deserving of mockery are the big budget, studio-backed films, packed full of high profile stars, which turn out to be turkeys.  What's their excuse?  All of which brings us to The Concorde..Airport '79, (or Airport 80: The Concorde, if you saw it here in the UK).  This, the final installment, as it turned out, in the Airport franchise, is a disaster movie in every sense.  The franchise itself had always been pretty dodgy quality-wise.  Indeed, the four films in the series were only loosely linked together by the continuing presence of George Kennedy as Joe Patroni, who gradually moves from being an airline's chief mechanic at the airport involved, to being another airline's chief of operations, an aviation consultant and finally a pilot.  Likewise, the films themselves shifted from being a glossy soap opera-cum-disaster flick based on an Arthur Hailey novel, to a more generalised series of films involving passenger aviation peril, with actual airports, (despite the titles), playing a smaller and smaller role.

The Concorde strays furthest from the original concept, offering us a conspiracy thriller fused with an airliner in peril plot.  This time the aircraft is the titular Anglo-French supersonic airliner, an example of which is on its maiden passenger carrying flight for a (fictional) US airline, heading from Washington DC to Moscow, with a stopover in Paris.  You just know that there's going to be trouble when you see the flight crew: Alain Delon is the pilot, George Kennedy the co-pilot and David Warner the flight engineer.  Oh, and Sylvia Kristel is the chief stewardess.  There's also the usual collection of unlikely passengers, including the dope smoking jazz saxophonist, the sick child en route to a heart transplant, the old lady scared of flying and so on.  The conspiracy theory part of the plot involves another passenger, a reporter who, the night before the flight, narrowly avoids an assassins bullet after witnessing an arms company execute who was giving her information about illegal arms deals, being gunned down by a hitman.  It seems that her friend Robert Wagner's arms company has been secretly selling its wares to all sorts of embargoed countries.  Having been handed the incriminating documents just before boarding the Concorde, Wagner decides to have her rubbed out by shooting down the entire plane.

His first attempt involves sending a new surface-to-air missile he's trialling for the US Air  Force being sent off course to lock onto the Concorde rather its target drone.  When this fails, he arranges for an F-4 Phantom to intercept the Concorde as it approaches French airspace.  (Quite where one finds privately owned and crewed, not to mention, fully armed, jet fighters for hire is never properly explained). The foiling of both these attempts by the Concorde crew are amongst the most incredible and unintentionally hilarious occurrences in the entire series.  Both involve a supersonic airliner being flown like a fighter aircraft, going through all manner of unlikely evasive manoeuvres, including 360 degree rolls.  Best of all though, is when they are attacked by the Phantom - first of all we witness George Kennedy opening the cockpit side-window, leaning out and firing a flare in order to distract the heat-seeking missiles fired by their attacker.  As if that wasn't astounding enough, when they run out of flares, Delon switches off the engines (in order to deprive the remaining missiles of their target heat source - in reality, friction from the flexing of metal components in the fuselage are enough for heat seeking missiles to detect) and glides the aircraft downward, before managing to restart one of the engines just before they hit the sea and pull it to safety.  At which point, of course, uses its guns instead, to attack them, but, just in time, the French Air Force turn up and shoot him down.  But the peril still isn't over - during their stop over in Paris, Wagner manages to bribe an airline employee to sabotage the Concorde's cargo hatch, so that it will open in mid-air, de-pressurising the hold and causing the plane to crash.  But never fear, the remarkable aeronautical skills of Delon and Kennedy once more saves the day, with them guiding the crippled Concorde to a crash landing in a snow-filled Swiss mountain pass.  Upon learning that the reporter has survived, Wagner shoots himself.

The ludicrousness of these plot elements alone wouldn't necessarily have sunk the film at the box office - they are enormously entertaining for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless entertaining.  The problem is that they are accompanied by a weak script which serves up poor dialogue for a cast that looks, in the main, as if they are simply going through the motions.  While George Kennedy still brings considerable charisma to a badly underwritten, (just how did he manage that unlikely career progression?), Delon is clearly there for the payday - audiences who had never seen any of his French films would have been mystified as to his status as actor and sex symbol, so bland is his performance.  But worst of all, despite excellent production values, the whole film is directed with the flatness of a TV movie - in spite of all the fantastical incidents and bizarre plot elements, it never sparks into life, the pace never varying from the pedestrian.  Which is hardly surprising, as director David Lowell Rich had spent most of his career at the helm of made-for-TV movies, (including, intriguingly, 1977's SST:Death Flight, which also concerned the ill-fated, sabotaged, maiden flight of a supersonic airliner).  The poor script (with all its loose ends) is, perhaps, less understandable, as writer Eric Roth later won an Oscar for his adaptation of Forrest Gump and has been nominated four other times, most recently for his script for the 2018 version of A Star is Born.  Everybody, it seems, can have an off day.

On the plus side, the special effects and miniatures work, for their era, are very good.  They were created by Universal Hartland, who were also producing effects for TV series like Buck Rogers.  Unfortunately, they weren't enough to save the film from box office failure.  A failure which killed off the entire franchise.  But I would still urge everyone to watch this film, despite all of its flaws, it is still hugely entertaining.  It is that rare cinematic beast, the film that really is so bad that it is 'good'.  The level of professionalism which has gone into it only serves to highlight just how laughable its plot, dialogue and action actually are.  Those self-appointed critics of bad movies can't just sit back and point and laugh at poor special effects and non-professional actors - this is a studio picture which seems willfully bad.  Its problems, I suspect, stem from complacency on the part of its producers, who simply assumed that the Airport label, passenger-plane-in-peril and other standard plot elements would be enough to bring in the audiences and that credibility and artistic quality were of little importance.  It was just a product.  In this case, a product that audience quality control rejected.  But nowadays, when it is available free-to-air on TV, you can sit back enjoy its big budget crapness.  The film does, however, have a darkly bizarre coda.  The Concorde used in the film was later leased by Aerospatiale to Air France and, in 2000, crashed, killing everyone on board - a crash which eventually led to the withdrawal from service of the Concorde fleets of both Air France and British Airways.  (Interestingly, the Boeing 707 used in Airport  also later crashed  - in Brazil -while in service as a cargo plane, killing all three crew and twenty two people on the ground).